Back to the Future - Episode 2 PC Game ~ GamesNHacks

Hammad Ansari on Sunday, March 13, 2011

Back to the Future - Episode 2 | PC Game | Genre: Adventure | {364MB}

A few days ago, the second episode of Telltale’s Back to the Future adventure game became available. We’ve already given our feelings on the first superb installment. Since this is, after all, an episode, much of the game is identical to its predecessor, so this review will be primarily focused on where it differs. Also, if you haven’t played the first episode, there may be spoilers within, so be forewarned.

The game play is much the same as it had been, though there appear to have been some tweaks. For instance, there are now a handful of points in the game where you must drag or direct your point of view in order to take in a full scene and identify the appropriate target. In a game where half of the challenge comes from finding all of the interactive elements in an area, increasing the searchable area to effectively a panorama seems like a natural evolution.

Another shift seems to have come in the form of navigation. There are portions of the game where the camera sticks with your character. The orientation is locked, but as you move it stays with you. I’m not sure if this was an attempt to improve the navigation, which was a little tricky last time, or a way to keep the point of view from revealing certain locations from certain angles. (In a game with time travel, it occasionally becomes necessary to keep the camera from straying too high, too low, or too far in either direction, lest it reveal a future version of the character in a parallel plot thread. More on that later.) Regardless of the motivation, it wasn’t the most efficient decision, leading you to run blindly toward the camera until an opening in a fence lines up with you. This is a minor problem, and one that ceases to be an issue once you are familiar with the layout.

System requirements

    * Operating system: XP Service Pack 3 / Vista / Windows 7 32-bit
    * Processor: 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
    * Memory: 256 MB RAM
    * Hard disk space: 2 GB
    * Video: ATI or NVidia card w/ 256 MB RAM
    * Sound: Direct X 8.1 sound device
    * DirectX®: Direct X 9.0c