Back to the Future II & III

"Suddenly, letting Biff rule the world doesn't seem so bad"

I loved the Back to the Future seires. I learned from that if we stand up for ourselves we can change the course of our entire lives. If we don't care about stupid challenges there's no limit to what we can do. You'd never have guessed that from the crummy games based on them, though.

This probably seems cool at first glance because you're getting a game about two movies for the price of one. Where else are you gonna find a deal like that? Nowhere. But this game is so dumb, so sloppy, so poorly-designed you probably won't even make it through a quarter of the first part.

Story of the BTTF series being that Doc Brown invents a car that can travel through time, and his young friend Marty McFly is forced to use it to escape some terrorists. He gets his dad to stand up to the local bully, Biff, when they're back in high school and life becomes a whole new story when he comes back to the present. On a trip to the future, unfortunately, the Biff of that time steals an almanac of sporting events Marty got so he could use the time machine to lay some lucky bets. He goes back in time and gives it to himself in the 50's, so that when Marty and Doc come back to the present, Biff is a millionaire gambler and has the entire town under his thumb. Somehow Marty has to get the almanac back to prevent this from happening.

But in the game, Biff didn't stop at taking the sports almanac into the past, he also took a bunch of other objects and put them into rooms under manhole covers in the wrong time periods, and for some reason I won't even try to make sense of, the presence of a rollerskate in 1985 or a record or hula hoop in 2015 threatens all life as we know it. So Marty has to find all of those objects in their hidden rooms and take them back to the RIGHT hidden rooms underneath manhole covers before he can get back the sports almanac and fix everything. Although I wonder if Marty's really the solution to this problem, warping the space time and continuum like he is by blantantly zipping around on hoverboards in the the 80's era...

But before he can even start doing that, Marty needs to find the remote control for the timemobile, even though it didn't have one in the movies, and even though he starts every new life by jumping out of it.

So Marty is running around Hill Valley, looking for places where he might find the stolen objects and avoiding the mutants stalking the city streets like walking buckets and fish as big as he is that fly out of nowhere. There's also gang members with hoverboards and guns running around looking to make Marty's life a short one too (I say guns because even though the guys obviously aren't holding guns, the sound they make when they shoot stuff at you sounds like it's trying really hard to impersonate the sound of a gun).

Anyway, the manholes in Hill Valley shoot up fifty feet in the air for little apparent reason, except that when they do you can run under them to see if they hide one of the rooms containing the proper place for one of the objects you need. Most of the time they won't, and you'll have half a second to get out of the way before the manhole cover comes back down and squishes Marty like a jelly donut. And sometimes the rocket-powered manhole covers are needed to lift Marty up to a high platform, but making use of them is easier said than done. See, if he just stands on one waiting for it to shoot up, it won't. You have to wait by the side and jump on it as it goes up. Careful, though, Marty! If you touch any part of it except the very top, Marty falls off the screen looking like someone just kicked him in the butt with red-hot golf cleats.

Sometimes you'll kill an enemy and get a key, which are good for opening doors, which rooms where Marty has to succeed at some stupid, timed challenge and if he succeeds he gets one of the misplaced items. The game is so dumb it doesn't even say what you just got, though. It says instead, "You got the...?" while an ugly picture of something unrecognizable falls into the hands of Marty posing like he just scored a touchdown. Now you just need to take that thing back where it belongs. And it's not just finding the right time period for each item, it's also finding the right sewer pipe to put it back in.

This whole game is so dumb and nonsensical, I've never gotten to the part that covers III. And not just because of the ridiculous challenges put to you, but because you have to spend hours playing this game to get and return even three or four items, there's like thirty, and there's absolutely no save feature. I almost thought they WANTED me to hate this game after I realized that.

Honestly, the only thing cool about Back to the Future II & III is that you can plant a seed in the past and then have a tree to provide a way up to a room when you come back to the present. That's sad. Michael J. Fox, you flew away with my heart in your airbore Dalorean, but I can't think of a bigger insult to you than this game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/04