I finally finished plowing through BTTF, The Game, although a review at this point seems rather fruitless, as everyone here has probably either played it or picked it up at the 99 cent PSN sale.
The game is exactly what it claims to be, a continuation of the plot of the original trilogy,where Doc has suddenly gone missing. A DeLorean shows up with Einstein (Doc's dog) in it with coordinates back to 1931. There Marty finds Doc in jail for a crime he didn't commit, and it's up to Marty to free him and get back to the present. Obviously there's more to it than that, similar to the previous movies where just one simple task gets mucked up by some oversight that causes them to go back and fix the mess they made.
As far as mistakes go, this game doesn't make a lot of them. The voice acting is decent, although sadly only Doc is back to reprise his voice. Everyone else is cast by someone else. The actor doing Marty does a rather good job, although his pitch is a little too high. Michael J. Fox does make a cameo as another McFly in the last episode, but that's about as close as we get to the original cast.
The puzzles are not overly difficult. It was nice for Telltale to include an in game hint system, so that players like myself weren't constantly referring to a FAQ for how to guide through the game. Still, for adventure game veterans who grew up with Lucasfilm and Sierra games, this will likely come off as insultingly easy. Not as easy as The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, but those are more interactive narratives than they are adventure games. The puzzles for the most part make sense, and it doesn't implement "moon logic" like some other adventure games do.
While the tale is fun, it's far from perfect. The overall plot slows down to a crawl at times. It seems like the developers didn't think they had enough actual story content at times, so they came up with padding the gameplay with various over complicated puzzles. Episode 3 is especially guilty of this, where you're forced to break the law multiple times in various contrived ways in order to meet the leader of a town. And near the end of the game, when the plot has CLEARLY run out of steam, I constantly found myself saying, "Jesus, can we just wrap this up already?"
Speaking of the end of the game, I suppose this isn't much of a spoiler, but basically this game doesn't end. It pulls a Bullsh!t move by opening up a brand new conflict at the last minute, and then saying, "To Be Continued." Sorry, but when I finished Episode 4, I was told this story was "To Be Concluded," so WTF is this? Some may say that they did this to leave it open for a sequel season, but I personally don't see that happening anytime soon. This series finished nearly 3 years ago (3 years this July actually), and I haven't read anything or heard anything from Telltale about another season. And given the fact that they have so much in the pipeline between The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and now they've been commissioned to do a series on Game of Thrones, I think it's fair to say that this series was a 1 and done, even if it wasn't intended to be. And it's a shame because had they not pulled what they did in the last minute, I would have been very satisfied with the ending I was presented. Now I'm just annoyed that there's a whole other adventure that I'll likely never get to embark on.
Still, the ending isn't nearly as infuriating as the The Last of Us to where it can truly sour my views of the rest of the game. Overall Telltale has done a fine job adding on to the BTTF mythos. Lord knows they couldn't have done much worse than the
OTHER BTTF game that we all had
burned into our memories...If you like BTTF and enjoy prodding your brain a bit, you'll probably find a good amount to like in this. If you don't like either of those things, then stay away. I give it a B-.
I suppose I should finally start playing Sonic Lost Worlds before I have to send it back to free up a slot for Watch Dogs, but we'll see what happens.
