Back to the Future: The Game is made up of five segments that see you take on the role of Marty McFly as you zip back and forth between the 1980s and 1930s in a new story line that borrows heavily from the original movie franchise...

Okay, I have a very weird confession to make. We were sent a Wii version of this game to play, but because the graphics and controls were so clunky, and because I was enjoying the actual game so much, I dug into my own pocket and bought the PS3 edition so that I could soak up the smoother graphics and better sound.

It's not that the Wii game is truly bad, it's just that the storyline to the game is really intriguing (as though a new Back to the Future movie was unfolding before my very eyes), that I wanted to make sure that I got the best out of it for my own selfish reasons. You see, Back to the Future is one of the highlights of my teen years, and still remains one of my favourite films of all time.

So, I picked up the PS3 edition and played that through first, before returning to the Wii edition to write this review... Okay, I'm a nerdy freak.

The strange thing is that this works better as a Wii game (the controls are a little hard to get used to on the PS3 and there's no option to change the default settings) as you spend a lot of time waving the controller around the environments looking for items to interact with. However, the graphics (while not overly great anyway) look much better on the PS3 and the loading time between each segment is marginally quicker on the PS3. I couldn't help laughing when in one segment I'd waited ages for the next part of the game to load, only to have Edna scold me for being late climbing the stairs: "Took you long enough!" Whether this was intentional on the part of the developers or not is unclear, but it's still pretty amusing.

The vocals are pretty impressive, with Christopher Lloyd (Doc Brown); Thomas Wilson (Biff Tannen) and Claudia Wells (Jennifer) all reprising their roles from the movies, AJ LoCascio takes on the role of Marty - and a damn good job he does too. His voice is almost identical to Michael J Fox's.

The music is well composed - heavily borrowing from Alan Silvestri's original scores, but changed just enough to be of interest.

Extras include Behind the Scenes videos and Video Reel with hours of audio commentary.

While far from an essential purchase, this game will be warmly welcomed by fans of the original movies.

7

Darren Rea