Alice: Madness Returns

ALICE: MADNESS RETURNS
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Alice: Madness Returns is an example of a genre I thought long dead. It’s a simple 3D platforming adventure game with combat that doesn’t revolve around shooting. There used to be a lot of games like this on the PS2, but I haven’t seen one in years. Fortunately it’s a reasonably well-executed example of the genre, since for all I know it could be the last we’ll ever get.

It’s the sequel to American McGee’s Alice, a PC game from the long-forgotten year 2000. The original Alice gained a lot of attention for running Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through a gore filter, because that wasn’t yet cliché in 2000, but this one feels almost quaint, since nowadays we, as a culture, go to much greater extremes when we want to produce a gored-up M-rated version of a beloved children’s property. Here’s the game’s story in one sentence: Alice’s family died in a fire and she’s crazy and hallucinating in Wonderland.

I want to criticize the game for being too long, but there’s a problem with that: I’m a game reviewer. My job is to play games and then write reviews, preferably under deadline. A long game makes it hard to do that. Alice: Madness Returns is so long that I was still trying to get through it the day after this review was due.

I don’t think I can call it too long, because I remember how I played games before I started reviewing them—I’d pick them up, play them until I lost interest, and then maybe come back a month or two later if I didn’t have anything better to do. Alice: Madness Returns isn’t perfectly suited to that play style, but it’s less about length and more about consistent quality of presentation. The point of playing the game is its visual design—it’s very pretty, most of the time, even when it’s being deliberately hideous. Except the second chapter is visually dreary! Starting the game and getting something that looks great and then beating the first level and having to trudge through relative visual mediocrity for a couple of hours of play for the second level is a huge downer. If you can get past chapter 2, I don’t think the game will feel too long thereafter.

The platforming is, well, platforming. I think it’s pretty good. Edge detection seems generous most of the time. I have a hard time judging platforming quality, though, because my skills in that area are very well developed, so even ridiculously hard shit feels OK to me.

I like the game’s combat. Alice gets four weapons—the vorpal blade (a knife), the hobby-horse (a hammer), the pepper-grinder (a Gatling gun), and the teapot cannon (a grenade launcher). She also gets a parasol she can use to deflect enemy projectiles. Knife and hammer get mapped to two separate buttons, while you have to use the D-pad to switch between guns. As the game progresses combat becomes nicely complex, using the knife for focused damage against single monsters and the hammer to clear groups and break defenses, while the guns play support roles. It wasn’t as fun until I got the teapot cannon, though. Also, the designers were nice and, for large enemies where you have to hit vulnerable spots, let us auto-target those spots specifically. It doesn’t suffer from a lot of the problems games from this play style’s heyday used to.

As the last hurrah for an essentially dead game genre, I recommend this one, but probably not if you have to play it on a deadline.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD

Previously – Transformers: Dark of the Moon