Sunday, 17 June 2018

Back to the Future: The Game - 30th Anniversary Edition


This is the second game from my Bean Dive that I’ve seen off and I’m not sure how I feel about the experience. It took a while to get through and had some ups and downs. I bought the game a long  time ago with no real intention of playing it straight away and the only reason I chose it now was because the title is so long, it was throwing my game collection on True Achievements out of whack. The game became Games with Gold on Xbox One after I had bought it on the 360 but I didn’t get it for a second playthrough and I’m glad as I don’t think I could go through it again.

Back to the Future follows the story of Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown after the events of the movie trilogy. Doc has gone back in time again for some reason and Marty has to find him… for another reason. They eventually meet up and make a load of fuck-tarded decisions to try and fix the timeline after Doc is killed.

It’s the same as the movies in this regard in that you have to suspend your disbelief in terms of the liberties they take with time travel. Only the liberties taken in the game are a lot bigger and more noticeable. Essentially every concept of time travel is completely ignored to drive the story.

The second thing that annoyed me was Marty. In the movies he’s a cool, easy-going guy but in this game, he’s an arrogant fucker with a stupid face. His dialogue is annoying. His face is annoying. And his environmental movement is annoying. Although this is more of a gameplay thing, the camera angles and walk directions are so fucked up that the biggest challenge you will face is getting Marty from one location to another.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Working out what to do is the tricky bit. Unlike most other TellTale games I’ve played, it’s not linear and you will have to click on most objects in the environment just to figure out what to do. I had to use a guide for most it as most actions are convoluted.

Sound wise, the voices are pretty good. They got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc for it as well as Thomas F. Wilson as Biff and there’s even a cameo by Michael J. Fox. They couldn’t get him to do Marty’s lines though, which is a shame because it may have made Marty likeable. Outside of the voices, the music is annoying and kept on playing the crescendo bit from the movies. All the time. Sometimes for no reason.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 59 Achievements

The game is split into five episodes, each with their own save and load section which makes getting achievements easier because if you cock up, like I did twice, you won’t have to play the whole thing through again. It’s excessively long too, each episode clocking in at over 2 hours. The gameplay isn’t enthralling either and I fell asleep a few times!

Roughly half of the achievements can be obtained just by playing through the game but the others take some planning. They all involve some kind of action, or repeated action and also relate back to the films in some way. The most irritating of these was in the final episode where you have to repeatedly talk to a cactus to get all of the ‘dialogue’ that comes out of it. It’s weird and there’s nothing in the achievement description to give you sensible directions as to what to do.

There are loads like this – too many to go through individually but that’s basically it for the achievements. With a guide it’s possible to get them all in a single playthrough. Without a guide you will be replaying forever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Back to the Future: The Game was a partially enjoyable story albeit with an annoying Marty McFly. The gameplay was more frustrating than fun and I can see how gameplay can actually ruin the story of a game from this experience. It may be why TellTale opted for more linear games with future titles.

Achievements wise, it will take over 12 hours to run through the game to get them all, but that’s only if you use a guide.

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