Alice: Madness Returns Review

It was after I finished Alice: Madness Returns that I questioned the “next gen platformer”.

What the game brought to the table was a traditional tale of good and evil, where conniving cats and mechanical hatters live to influence you on your quest to find sanity in a world gone mad.

The tale of Alice is simple enough to get into, while having just enough of a lasting impact to push the player along to the next world with an ideal sense of wonder and curiosity.

The initial hook of the game is the art style. It’s dark and broody, it’s gritty and cartoony, and everything in the world, from the enemies that run to you, to the stationary trees that blot the landscape  seem benevolent, with their own nightmarish agendas to tend to. The mixture of dread and wonder is what makes Alice a game that can annoy you to no end with it’s repetition, but make your quest to help Alice accomplish her goal that much more pertinent.

Don’t let me get ahead of myself. Alice is American Mcgee’s re imagining of “Alice in Wonderland”, and the sequel to the stellar original “American McGee’s Alice”. Alice is still having nightmares, and the poor girl can’t quite live past the mystery of the fire that killed her parents. Her mind is hellbent on an answer, and her venture into Wonderland reflects her sour state of mind. Things have changed for the worse since she left, and Madness Returns does a fantastic job with the art direction to make things strange and unique. Creativity sparkles with life in a place without boundaries, without the confines of reality, where the only thing the two have in common is gravity.

Alice moves in a floaty, surreal way. Her animations are slower than they should be for how fast she is moving, which gives off the feeling of being in a dream world. London looks as dreary as ever, with gray tones, rain clouds and drunks peppering the street while children run from one cracked road to another playing “hide and seek”. The idea of Alice not having a true place to stay makes the game that much more interesting. Both are hellish in nature, with dark overtones and bad attitudes that squander peace and relaxation.

"Come In, Come in. There's nothing to fear."

Many critics complain about the jumping mechanics in the game, and I found them to be perfectly suitable. Rarely did I miss a jump because of the game and not my own bad timing, and so calculating a correct landing takes that much more skill, and crossing a path of floating platforms is truly rewarding, and makes you all hopped up for the next section.

General combat seems fluid, with combos stringing themselves together in a believable fashion.Attacks are wonderfully animated and enemies aren’t terribly stupid foes. They don’t wait for you most of the time, and will kill you when given the chance. I had some issues with falling on my ass after a powerful foe punched my body, trying to get up before he hit me again, and failing to do so.

Double attacks like that felt cheap, and because many of the enemies in Alice: Madness Returns have attacks that can do that, battles can feel cheap because of a lack of “blinking, wounded, temporarily invincible Alice” like you would see in a Sonic game. There’s a reason that games have that small chunk of time for the player to roll out of the way or get to safety without additional penalties. It’s fair gaming.

Because there was so many battles popping up as you make your way through Wonderland, with the same enemies using the same “emerging from the ground” animations, things got rather old, rather fast.

Battles where many of the same enemy would spawn from thin air would play out to allow Alice into a new room, where the same number of enemies spawned from thin air to fight her.

I got the feeling that the developer, Spicy Horse (a name that puts a smile on my face), felt that making minimal changes in the environment and   scenery could  make the same combat experience fresh and unique. It doesn’t. Players aren’t that stupid. We know when a game has pacing issues when large portions of the environment consists of similar “rinse and repeat” battles that do little to distinguish themselves from one another.

Other complaints consist of invisible walls in places that didn’t need them, such as a large tree with roots that bellow out from the ground, and do not allow players to pass under them, even in Alice’s shrunken form. In general, large holes in world objects give the impression of passage, especially in that shrunken form, but not allowing it due to an invisible wall breaks the sensation of freedom and reminds us that this is after a game. The weapons: Vorpal Blade, Pepper Grinder, and Hobby Horse utilize the Light, Ranged, and Heavy attacks, while the Teapot Cannon fills the void as the grenade option in a convincing manner, and by spending the teeth collected from the dead bodies of enemies and other ways, Alice can upgrade her arsenal. But the upgraded weapons feel the same regardless of what level of upgrade she gets. For a game that revolves around jumping and fighting, a game that shows creativity in each and every platform Alice lands on, so much of it could have been spent on cool and quirky upgrades for the weapons used throughout the game. Think Ratchet and Clank and the plethora of comical genius with every and every weapon “idle” animation, gears that rotate and move in and out of their sockets, smoke that puff out a vent or cause the gun to shake violently, lights that flicker in quick succession and turn red when stopped. These subtle changes in animation can further define a whacky world where things aren’t what they seem and everything has a mind of it’s own.

Pages: 1 2