VGL Presents: Alice Madness Returns review

Posted by: Kristastrxphe

Welcome, my Legion! Kris here, with another new review!
Today I am reviewing Spicy Horse’s sequel to American McGee’s Alice; Alice Madness Returns, published by EA for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

American McGee’s Alice made its debut when it was released in October of 2000. Since then, it has become a cult favorite and has never been forgotten. We wanted more… And it’s finally come.

Alice: Madness Returns is about Alice Liddell, who has spent most of her life in Rutledge Asylum ever since her parents were killed in a fire. She now lives in London under the care of her psychiatrist, Dr. Angus Bumby. While walking down the street, she finds a white cat and decides to follow it. Alice then returns to Wonderland where the Chesire Cat tells her that things have changed. Alice must save her Wonderland once again, while learning to cope with her being traumatized over her family’s death.

So, the story concept is pretty solid. There are many cut scenes and narration to keep the pace and story apparent in the game. The voice acting; with the exception of a few minor things; sound pretty good. Alice in specific sounds wonderful. The sound and music in the game sound great as well.

The graphics in Alice are really interesting. With all of the crazy and interesting color choices, the distorted shape of the characters and the level design, this game does look pretty incredible. The world itself is absolutely stunning, with the exception of backgrounds popping in and items like picnic baskets just popping into existence when you unlock them. It’s a little off in those departments, but the actual levels look stunning.

Alice’s character design is drop-dead gorgeous. The other characters in the game haven’t changed much from the original American McGee’s Alice, but they still look more detailed and much better.

The game mechanics are pretty simple and easy to learn. Different weapons are used by a specific button on the controller. I am playing the Playstation 3 version, so for example, to attack with the Vorpal Sword, the button is Square; and I won’t go into detail about the other unique and interesting weapons in the game.

One might say Alice is a mindless button-mashing hack n slash. And while the combat pretty much is like that, certain weapons do better against certain enemies, and mastering dodging, deflecting, jumping, and etc, keeps it really engaging and fun in my opinion.

The platforming in Alice is spot on. The world layout and over all look just makes platforming, jumping, etc, just so much more interesting as you get to run around the gorgeous map designs. Speaking of platforming, one thing that is rather different, but I really enjoy it, is Alice cannot grab onto ledges. They did not ad any form of grab when at the edge of anything. To work around the lack of grabbing and also climbing, Alice has been given a triple jump. Alice may jump up to 3 times while still in the air for getting some really good distance and range. I don’t recall many platformers that do something like that, so it makes you stop and kind of look around for a moment, deciding whether or not you can make that jump or not, or need to find a different way around it.

The puzzles work out really well in levels as well. From finding invisible walkways to different areas, shooting at a clock to reset it, or even mini games such as a side-scrolling shooter game, picture puzzles, music puzzles, etc… All are well placed into the world. Some can be trickier than others to figure out. Scattered throughout the maps are collectables such as Alice’s memories to further the back story, bottles, pig-snouts, etc… In the beginning of the game, Alice bathes in a fountain labeled Drink Me, that gives her an infinite power to shrink (by holding down the L2? button). This gives Alice the ability to travel into and/or under small places such as key holes. She cannot attack nor jump while you are holding down the Skrink button, so keep that in mind.

Something I didn’t realize when I first started the game, until around the point I am at right now, is that your weapons can be upgraded by the points you collect by killing enemies, breaking open crates, etc. The points come in the form of teeth (bone and gold ones). For some reason I just didn’t question what the teeth were used for. Silly me. Anyways… Well, it turns out in the weapons section on the menu screen; you can spend the teeth for Leveling up your weapons from 1 to 2, and so on. Another fun thing is when Alice is near-death, she can go into a super-powered mode called Hysteria, where she turns completely white with blood all over her, and you can just go to town on the enemies if you are overwhelmed. Note that you need to be near death (by having only ½ of 1 flower left on your life bar). Activate Hysteria by pressing L3 (on ps3 controls).

Over all, Alice: Madness Returns is a very clever, and fantastic sequel to a great game from our past. The dark and twisted story of Alice by American McGee is a new look on a well-known tale. On top of all of that, the game is just fun as hell to play. It looks great, it plays great. Oh, and did I mention NOSTALGIA out the ass!? Those who have been waiting for this game since American McGee debuted Alice in 2000

On a final note, I pre-ordered Alice from the EA Store online, which had a (what I believe to be) exclusive deal for a code to unlock the original American MeGee’s Alice game, rescaled and recoded to run on whatever system you bought Madness Returns for. The code gave you the original game for free, but it was released on PSN and the Xbox store for $9.99 or 800 MSpoints. So that is some exciting news. Now everyone has full access to the full American McGee’s Alice story as well as the new game, to complete the story.

Most importantly, I give Alice: Madness Returns a whopping 9.75 cups of tea out of 10.