A little repetition is not enough to mar the beauty and unsettling atmosphere of Alice's quest for sanity
Stylish, elegant character and environment design – entertaining combat – Alice is a solid, well written character – great soundtrack and voice acting – lengthy story mode – plenty of secrets to discover – 2D platform section is a lot of fun – comes with free downloadable prequel
THE BAD
Combat and exploration get mildly repetitive – uneven texture quality – only a single boss fight in such a long game – occasional bugs and glitches
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Back in 2000 EA released the critically acclaimed American McGee's Alice, a gothic, twisted follow-up to the Alice in Wonderland books by Lewis Carroll. Now, 11 years later, a sequel is finally available to conclude Alice's story.
The first game told the tale of the little girl's descent into insanity ensuing the tragic death of her family in the fire which consumed their house. After drifting back to a a dark version of Wonderland, Alice finally confronted the Red Queen, but concluding she was the cause of the fire who ended her family. After spending several years in an insane asylum, Alice is entrusted to the care of Doctor Bundy, which uses hypnotism to treat troubled children by erasing negative memories. Despite making progress in forgetting the traumatic events of her past, Alice finds herself back in the ruined Wonderland, where she is warned that instead of forgetting she needs to recover the memories of what really happened the night of her family's death so she can forgive herself and restore her sanity, with the help and counsel of her old friend the Cheshire Cat, a welcome return from the original game.
The story is told through simple but well rendered cutscenes featuring paper cut characters, or via in-game dialogue.
This interesting premise is the backdrop for a platform-action hybrid, which is a nice throwback to the original game, with a familiar line of of narrow ledges and moving platforms alternated by quick and frantic arena battles, but with a few key innovations. Alice has a new arsenal of imaginative weapons at her disposal aside from her returning blood-stained knife: a pepper grinder serving a a machine gun to quickly mow down weaker enemies at long range, a hobby horse to deliver slow but devastating melee attacks, a kettle firing explosive tea drops to bring down the stronger foes and an umbrella which allows her to deflect enemy projectiles. All of her equipment is fun to use and the game balances the infinite ammo of ranged weapons with the need to let them cool down after a few seconds of sustained fire. The player can either click the right stick to enter aiming mode, which handles very much like your standard third person shooter, or hold down the left trigger to lock on to the enemy on the center of the screen, then tilt the right stick to switch targets. It's a solid mechanic ad it works really well when facing small groups of enemies, but can get clunky when trying to lock onto a particular target among a crowd of bad guys.
When she's nor shooting her way through the levels, Alice can perform simple combos with her knife and hobby horse. The game encourages you to experiment in mixing the two weapons to create longer combos, but don't expect anything Kratos-like, it's all pretty simple and immediate. All damage-dealing weapons can also be upgraded by spending teeth, which can be found everywhere in the levels and in great quantity in the many hidden areas. To avoid damage Alice can dodge by turning into a swarm of butterflies, which is a nice variation on the "roll out of the way" theme in most action games.
The enemies you'll fight are quite varied: aside from gunky monstrosities with doll faces you'll face samurai wasps, robot teapots, ghost sailors, creepy killer dolls and many more, which definitely keeps you interested to see what foes the next level might conceal. Something that feels a bit off is the lack of bosses: aside from the final boss and the occasional bigger enemies there aren't any to speak of, which feels a little like a missed opportunity. At one point the game even pokes fun at the player by introducing a huge boss-like robot at end of a level, only to have it fall apart on its own one second later. It's funny, but a boss fight might have been more interesting at that point.
The level are quite beautifully designed and really show the care that was put into the art direction: lush forests, dark factories, doll graveyards, underwater caves and a stunning card castle building itself in the sky all convey the sense of a once beautiful land fallen into a spiral of madness and decay, but still retaining part of its innocence in many areas, much like our conflicted protagonist. Alice drifts back and forth between her imaginary Wonderland to the real world, a bleak and dirty victorian London full of gritty characters and prostitutes. Alice herself goes from the fiercely beautiful warrior girl she is in her mind to the sickly, almost washed-out real self. These sections are a nice change of pace and often reward the player with juicy bits of the story.
The level design is often convoluted but you'll rarely find yourself stumped. Alice can triple jump and glide for long distances, ascend on steam flows and shrink at any time to fit through narrow passages, usually leading to secrets. Shrinking also activates a "Shrink Sense", which displays hints drawn on walls and invisible platforms floating in the air. It's a clever way to hide secrets in plain sight and keep the player snooping around for Alice's missing memories, represented by objects belonging to the people the memories are about, and bottles containing artworks and extras which can be viewed from the main menu. There are even some hilarious flying pig snouts you need to make sneeze with your pepper grinder to reveal hidden goodies.
Technically speaking the game is fairly inconsistent: on one hand we have beautifully rendered characters models and mostly nice environments, on the other we often see extremely low-res or slow-loading textures in plain sight and occasional pop-up issues. It's a pleasing game to look at and Alice has a nice variety of great-looking outfits changing from level to level, but it could have done much better. The sound is excellent all the way through the game, both in the musical and acting compartment, the only minor flaw being some caricatural british accents which can sometimes be a little too thick to be properly deciphered by everyone.
There are a few bugs here and there, an enemy may get stuck in the scenery causing a door to remain closed, forcing a restart from a checkpoint, but they're rare and do not impact gameplay in any significant manner.
Alice: Madness Returns is a long game too: it will take you somewhere between 15 and 20 hours to beat the story mode on normal, depending on how much exploring you'll be willing to do. The length of the campaign is both a good and bad aspect though: it sometimes feels as though we are playing a 10 hours game stretched out to be 20 hours long. Combat gets repetitive relatively quickly and the sequence of jumping area, levers and enemy encounters just feels spread too thin, especially near the end. There are some arcade sections and puzzles thrown in to add variety, like a fantastic 2D section in some paper-made mountains of China which is so good it would deserve its own separate game. Some of the others include a spaceshooter-like section with a galleon, a marble madness-inspired level with a doll head, a minigame with chess pieces and a sliding blocks puzzle which is repeated way too many times. You won't be able to shake the feeling of deja-vu, but the game manages to never be boring nonetheless.
This is is a solid, charming game which will certainly appeal to fans of the original but is also a good action platformer in its own right, it also comes with a code to download the original American McGee's Alice free of charge.
Alice: Madness Returns may not be perfect, but it's encouraging evidence that revivals of old series are a good thing and can be done well.