I recently played Episode 1 of TellTale's Back to the Future game. I'd been following the game's development from announcement to release, and was eager to see if it was any good.
The biggest thing going for the game is the fact that they got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc Brown, and while he does sound older, he does lend the game some much needed credibility. Michael J. Fox wasn't able to voice Marty, but the guy they cast does a very convincing impression.
Some of the other voices, though, aren't so convincing - such as George McFly and Biff. Their voices are close, but sound a little bit off.
The music is excellent, and definitely has the Back to the Future vibe. Presentation-wise, this is quite faithful to the source material.
This game tells a new chapter in the story, taking place in 1986 and 1931. Marty's first task is to find anything dangerous in Doc's house when the bank decides to sell off his possessions. Biff is there making a nuisance of himself, and there's a few puzzles to solve there - one is very easy if you remember the opening scene to the first movie.
Most of the puzzles are easy, though. Simply because there's never that many items to interact with, and so if you can't figure something out, trying everything with everything doesn't take that long.
The episode suffers from the TellTale brevity. There's an introduction scene with a few basic puzzles, another scene with one simple goal, and then you're let loose in 1931 Hill Valley with only a few tasks you need to accomplish before an exciting action scene that doesn't take too much thinking to puzzle out.
And then the "To be continued" appears, after maybe 2 hours of play. I'm hoping that the later chapters are a bit longer, because waiting a month or more just to play another couple of hours is going to be torture for some. At least when I was playing Tales of Monkey Island, the games were usually twice as long, and were loaded with extra references if you looked hard.
In Back to the Future, there are some references to the movies, one involving a poster of a shark, but they are infrequent and not all that funny, invoking more of a "oh haha, I get it" type reaction.
There isn't even that much to say about it to bother writing a full review. I've said just under 400 words and even that seemed to ramble on a bit. The first episode is free to download from the site at the moment, possibly to hook you into playing the rest of the series.
But I think I'll wait for the rest of the series to be completed before I make the investment.
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Halon - February 25, 2011 (10:57 PM) I actually heard that it is supposed to be pretty good. Haven't played it and probably won't until it's super cheap, though. |
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