Ultimately disappointing
There's a moment in Back To The Future: The Game where Marty ends up in a totalitarian version of Hill Valley. (Don't worry, I'll get to the right game in a moment.) He manages to get to the mayor's office, where 'Citizen Brown' is in charge, and tries to explain what's gone wrong. Doc Brown is a smart man and, although he doesn't immediately believe it, he quickly understands just how important it is to set everything right again, and it's clear to the player how horrified he is.
There's time travel in A New Beginning, though it's not a gameplay element, but it misses something else from that scene - characters who react appropriately to incredible events. For example, you travel to the present (actually the early 80s) with a documentary about the catastrophe that ultimately destroys the world, full of verifiable and explicit information. Before you can show this to somebody important, you have to incite a crowd into inadvertently mocking a bald man, destroy a prized sportscar, and secretly feed a professor a spicy canapé and spoiled punch. Not an option in-game: go straight to the media or a university with your dire warnings, technology from centuries-hence to demonstrate an alternative, and your expended-but-otherwise-functional time machine!
Character motivation isn't the only problem with the game, just a common one, and while there are efforts to justify such behaviour they come too late. Meanwhile there are spelling errors, and several times I saw prompts in Russian or French instead of English. Because characters face towards objects they interact with, and most objects are in the background, they spend a lot of time speaking with their backs turned obscuring the item in question - and an attempt at lip-sync animation (all dialogue is voiced, and there are plenty of phrases to avoid repetition, which is helpful) often didn't work well. I also experienced two outright crashes, including one in the penultimate cutscene. I expected better from the 'Final Cut' version, which I thought meant a little extra polish, or at least a spellcheck. At least the imagery was good, though there wasn't much of a style to it - backgrounds were full of detail, useable items were drawn equally well (until I discovered the option to highlight interactive items, the game risked becoming an infuriating pixel-hunt) and there's enough flavour to almost make exploring worthwhile. I can't see myself using any scenes as background wallpaper, but that's more to do with subject matter than quality - algae farms and security fences aren't very scenic.
The biggest flaw for me was that after a while the actual gameplay detracted from my enjoyment. The plot was interesting, mostly - some developments near the end resolved the obvious questions, but left me disappointed, and there were a few subplots that were ignored once they'd been used for a puzzle - and the writing was tolerable, with interesting ideas & themes that are made more explicit as the game progresses. But in hindsight I'd have rather experienced it in a book instead of partially-animated cutscenes and inventory-management puzzles. Perhaps I'm being harsh by comparing it to what I expected instead of games that actually exist, or those last plot twists rubbed me the wrong way, but short of a few either-or achievements there's no point in revisiting it.
