Details: Released in 2010. Played it on the PC. Purchased for about four dollars. Five episodes in total that took about two hours each to beat.
When you hear the name Telltale Games (and know a little about video games) you think about games like the Walking Dead. You think about games with branching plot lines, meaningful choices that change major plot points in the game and cause alternate endings. Back to the Future: The Game is not one of those games. You need to remember that this game predates The Walking Dead game. Back to the Future: The Game is a very traditional adventure game that follows a single, linear plot line. Fortunately, that plot line is decent.
It is only free for four more days as of the writing of this post.
Here’s the review.
A while back I tried the Walking Dead series from Telltale Games and did not enjoy it. Since this episode of Telltales Batman was free, I decided to give their games a second chance.
If you aren’t familiar with their video game style, Telltale basically make adventure games that are reminiscent of the choose you adventure style books. You have limited control of your character and gameplay generally consists of quick time events and narrative decisions. Their most popular series relate to popular franchises like Game of Thrones, the Walking Dead, and Borderlands.
This episode is split into five chapters and the story starts from the beginning of Batman’s career. Bruce Wayne has been fighting crime as Batman for a bit of time now and is assisting Harvey Dent in his run for mayor of Gotham City. It’s clear that Batman has yet to run into any of his major super villains and in this first episode, he meets some of them for the first time.
What I like about this episode is that Telltale is clearly intent on rewriting the Batman history. Everything seems to be fair game from Batman’s parents to super villains back stories. You can tell that the characters will follow similar trajectories as their comic book or movie counterparts, but there will likely be some twists on those characters along the way.
In regards to the audio, the music and voice acting are great. I recognized the voices of Laura Bailey and Troy Baker and, as a fan of their work, enjoyed hearing them in this game.
In terms of gameplay, there was little to do. This is an unabashed adventure game. In other words, it’s your narrative decisions that matter, not your reflexes or skill. If you don’t like that, don’t play the game.
Score: 6.5/10 Not a bad start and actually got me wanting to buy the rest of the episodes. Hard to criticize a game that was free.
Muse Bank 