Back to the Future: The Game is, if nothing else, entertaining.
Cons: Surprisingly bland and humorless at other times; Stiff animations and poor lip-synch; Pacing falters near the end of the saga
Back to the Future is a widely loved movie, with good reason: it managed to strike a fine balance between satirical humor, likeable characters, strong performances, and high-concept sci-fi. Thus, expectations were reasonably high when Telltale announced that it would be making a Back to the Future game series. Given that video game storytelling is frequently rough, this could have ended disastrously with the final project not even nearing expectations, but fortunately in this case, the final product holds up fairly well.
Picking up shortly after the events of the third movie, Episode 1 of the series sees Doc gone and his house up for sale. It doesn't take long before the iconic DeLorean shows up with a message suggesting that Doc has been trapped in time and that Marty needs to rescue him. What follows over the next five episodes is an escalating plot that sees you dealing with a younger Doc, 1930s mobs, alternate timelines and a whole lot more by the end.
Part of the fun of the series is seeing what directions the plot takes next, so the rest of this review will avoid spoilers. Each episode is largely self-contained, aside from an overarching plot in the third and fourth episodes, and-bar some pacing issues in the final episode-things keep moving along at a steady clip. The story overall feels very faithful to the original series: themes of rewriting history, erasing people from existence, and the relationship between Marty and Doc are explored and handled carefully. A great attention to detail, and more than a few winks and nods to the original trilogy show a true care and love for the original source material.
Not everything is nailed though, and the humor often feels a bit off. Don't get me wrong, Back to the Future: The Game, is overall quite funny: satire of 1930s mobsters and prohibitionists is good for a few laughs, and recurring characters like the Tannen family provide constant humor. However, there are certain points where the games just aren't as entertaining as they ought to be. Scenes with Edna Strickland, a major new character in the series, for instance, have the potential to be hilarious, and yet are frequently humorless.
Luckily, though, the game does keep pace, so you rarely find yourself stuck in these scenes for long. The gameplay is the same as any '90s point-and-click adventure, and the puzzle design is very well balanced across the whole. Puzzles tend to err on the easy side, but don't expect to breeze through them without any thought involved at all. Typically you won't get the solution on your first try, but will probably get it within your first few. Worst come worse, there's a hint system to fall back on for the few puzzles that take more than a few tries. Even though solutions aren't outright handed to you, you shouldn't expect to too long on most puzzles, and the pacing benefits greatly as a result. This applies to the whole series; there aren't any moments that stick out as being unusually hard.
Gameplay is pretty consistent across the board, but unfortunately presentation isn't. On the one hand, you have some absolutely stellar voice acting. Each character is brought to life by their voice actor, and a few characters, such as Doc, even have the original actors lending their voices. The others, such as Marty and Biff, have been replaced by rather talented imitators. The voice actor who did Marty McFly's voice in particular should be commended, as he sounds uncannily like '80s era Michael J. Fox.
On the other hand, however, lies a far less impressive visual side of presentation. On paper the visual style sounds fine: portray Hill Valley and its residents in a cartoony manner that retains the fun and wonder of the original movies without heading towards the UNCANNY valley. Something went wrong, however, and the models are frequently ugly and poorly animated. More often than not, lip-synching doesn't even feel properly timed, let alone accurately tied to what was being said; animations have clear starts and stops, and the transitions are often jumpy. In a story-focused game such as this one, a weak visual presentation does tend to detract from the experience a bit, even if it can't bring the whole thing down.
This will hardly matter to Back to the Future fans though, who can consider this game an easy recommendation. Even if you aren't a diehard fan, the end product is sufficiently entertaining, with good-enough writing and superb voice acting to justify killing a few afternoons on it. Telltale has successfully avoided ruining the Back to the Future series even if they haven't really moved it forward either.