I just finished up Back To The Future: The Game 30th Anniversary Edition and I wanted to share my thoughts on this TellTale Game. TellTale Games has had a series of great titles recently, The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead games are some of the biggest hits on the market currently having sold millions for both games. (Currently you can find the complete season one of The Walking Dead for free on Xbox One in case you are interested in checking out why TellTale has been so successful.) With Back To The Future, TellTale looks to capitalize on that success by bringing back a majority of the original actors from the movies. Yes, Doc Brown is voiced by Christopher Lloyd and James Arnold Taylor portrays the young Emmett Brown. Both do exceedingly well to make this feel like a Back To The Future movie. Tom Wilson is also back as Biff and really does an excellent job throughout. The big surprise however came from the voice actor for Marty McFly, A.J. LoCascio filled in those big shoes that Michael J Fox had created and the new guy does extremely well for himself. To me, this game really does an excellent job of making sure you feel like your watching a Back To The Future movie by having as many of the original characters as possible in it. If they couldn’t get the original actors then they found almost identical sounding people to fill the roles. TellTale also made a great choice by bringing back Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, they are two of the original writers for the Back To The Future Series and with them on board TellTale Games helped to basically create Back To The Future 4 but, in a game.
Now, even though I have enjoyed hearing the actors and enjoying how well they filled their roles I did have some issues on my journey through Hill Valley. Graphically the game is lacking a bit in my opinion. It seems if they would have worked on the game for another week or two they could have fixed a couple of the graphical errors. I was noticing pictures that you could see through. There were boxes around some of the fire that clearly showed. I had quite a bit of issues with walking Marty simply through the Courtyard of Hill Valley due to the little gazebo sitting in the middle. I just finally gave up and began walking around it to save time. Also, the controls seemed a bit strange to me at first, I was noticing that going from camera angle to the next that I would not have to move the direction of my thumb-stick. This is pretty nice but at first it’s hard to get used to. Some choices and puzzles become repetitive unless you use a tip. Once I hit the next cinematic though I would tend to forget about it.
Even though I have a few negative comments about the game, they make up for it in multiple other areas. Considering the game is only $19.99 at retail for all five episodes you can’t really go wrong here. Especially since this game feels like Back To The Future 4, and that it is a blast to hear all the characters as mentioned before, but the real kicker for me was how entertained I was. The overall gameplay actually kept me engaged and interested. I will admit, I am a sucker for puzzles so walking around Hill Valley and trying to find ways to progress into the next part through various methods proved to not tire me out or make me bored. I really felt engaged due to being a Back To The Future fan. The guitar battle with Leech is probably one of the more interesting ones, or the Tannen ran Speakeasy under a Soup Kitchen. The way they put the story together and came up with little fun things to do really drew me in. The Achievements were easy to obtain but fun tie ins sometimes. There is a sign you can look that has the writers names on it, and you get an Achievement just for finding it. They main thing that I really will have to say was done extremely well was the story. If you go back and watch Back To The Future from start to finish and then play this game as I did, you really feel like your watching a full story that is well connected and thought out. Even though its been over thirty years, it still feels like its a part of the main series.
Overall I will say the bad outweighs the good in some cases. Especially when some moments became repetitive or a graphical bug sticks out. The story and voice acting is really what wins me over though. Once I had an issue such as those I would easily forget them and try to focus back on what was happening in this timeline. The puzzles kept my attention and were very fun, although, as mentioned, there were those small hiccups where you can see they didn’t seem to take the time to really polish the game fully. But overall I feel the game gets a 4 out of 5 from me. It isn’t perfect but, it’s fun. I would highly recommend watching all three Back To The Future movies in order before playing to get caught back up again.
