Back to the Future: the Game, a review

Back to the Future: the Game, a review

"When this baby hits 23 miles per hour, you're going to see some serious cowflop."

—Young Emmett Brown

Former Lucasarts employees gathered together to create Telltale games, a small company dedicated to point-and-click adventures as well as puzzle solving more than the run-and-gun first person shooters that were topping the charts. As they grew successful with CSI, Law & Order and Sam and Max games, they decided to get licenses for movies and other franchises such as The Walking Dead and Back to the Future.

Of course, who could forget “Back to the Future”, the Robert Zemeckis trilogy following the exploits of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) with their time traveling Delorean as they travel to alternate pasts, future, and presents through a laugh out loud comedy.

Set in 1986, Marty is busy living his life without time travel. However, Doc Brown has been missing for months and the bank plans to sell off his estate. Things change when the Delorean, once thought destroyed at the end of Back to the Future: Part III reappears, only to show Einstein, Doc’s dog, and his shoe. Marty eventually uncovers the mystery only to find him in 1931 and sees Doc Brown in jail. It’s up to Marty to break Doc Brown out of jail, try not to trip up the time stream so much and interact with various historical Hill Valley figures such as the singer Trixie Trotter, the moral vanguard Edna Strickland, Biff’s father and local gangster “Kid” Tannen, a young Emmett Brown and Marty’s grandfather, accountant Artie McFly during the gangster days of prohibition.

The game might be a simple point and click, but the productions are top notch. Jared Emerson-Johnson, composer for all the Telltale games, imitates Alan Silvestri’s score to a note, Christoper Lloyd reprises Doc Brown with all the charm that he originally brought, the characters are fun and fleshed-out for any newcomer or veteran to enjoy and the puzzle solving is ingeniously made.

The Telltale model of release also changes things up. Rather than dropping 60 USD for a full game, the creators opted to either by each episode individually when released or buy them in a bundle for a cheaper total price and have access with a season pass. Just as well, instead of releasing the entire game, Telltale cuts its contents into episodes, where you’ll play episode 1 now and then wait 2 months for the next one. Seems odd at first, but brilliant in the long run, allowing newcomers to get in and cutting the release date down, playing more like a TV season than a movie.

I want to mention the visuals, because they show how brilliant the method is. Instead of going for the hyper-realism that so many games opt for these days, Back to the Future uses a simpler engine. While the softer textures may put off some players, it allows for a more creative look to the game and it allows systems that didn’t have the super processing power to run more powerful games, such as the Wii or the iPad, to get on-board and play the game. Plus, it’s much cheaper to render, saving Telltale lots of money but giving them the ability to profit from many more platforms other higher demanding games miss out on.

But most of all, it uses Marty’s wit to solve his problems, not his fists. Sure, Marty’s capable of punching a guy out on the best of circumstances, but most of the time, he’ll be out-gunned, out-numbered and out-matched, so he’ll need to do some on the fly puzzle solving to figure out the right answer. That’s a rarity these days where the norm is to ‘keep shooting, occasionally take cover’.

If you’re a diehard fan of the Back to the Future franchise and somehow ‘haven’t’ picked up this gem, you owe it to yourself to not only buy this game but play it. It pays justice and tribute to the original source material and is much more a spiritual successor than whatever Hollywood’s planning with that Back to the Future sequel.

Highly Recommended