A Beautiful Visual Experience Marred by Repetition
Alice: Madness Returns poses an interesting question – what if the titular character from Alice in Wonderland had mental problems and those mental problems warped the very essence of what Wonderland was? Would such a fantastical place retain its original form or would it be warped into something barely recognizable? Of course, this very question is answered in both this game and the original from 2000, showing a twisted and dark version of a world that so many children have been enamored with from their childhoods.
The story begins with Alice Liddell, the famous Alice from the original story, waking up in a sort of orphanage for children with mental problems. It seems she hasn’t quite gotten over the mental disarray caused by her family’s tragic deaths to a house fire. This foster house and the dreary London townscape outside are a great opening to the game, setting the mood perfectly for what is to come. Little details such as the unsettling pictures drawn by other children and Alice’s droll, yet ultimately realistic comments about things you can examine show this world for what it really is – a town full of people just trying to get by as best they can, without too much guilt about what they have to do to get it.
Of course, these real world sequences are intercut by the real meat of the game, Alice’s forays into the wonderful Wonderland. The sense of dread runs so deep, it has even infected this once cheerful and manic world. Everything that is wrong with Wonderland is the blame of a new evil that has risen, a train symbolizing everything that is wrong in Alice’s mind. This train is the “villain” of the game and is essentially what Alice is trying to reach and defeat. In each level, a door is found (usually about halfway through the level), a fiery door that says Liddell above it. Stepping through these triggers more of Alice’s memories of that fateful night when everything changed for her. An image of a keyring is also shown, each memory adding a key to the ring, the key pieces of that repressed memory that Alice needs to solve the mystery of what happened on that fateful night.
The gameplay is best described as a mix of third-person platforming and combat, with maybe a bit more of the focus on the platforming. Alice is well-prepared for her death-defying leaps, possessing the ability to triple jump as well as twirl and float for a short time. While it may seem like overkill, the game’s jumps are often designed to need every last inch of Alice’s height and distance and the lack of a ledge grab means that you need to land completely on solid ground. Also important is Alice’s ability to shrink at will, a trick that reveals hidden platforms and writing within the world. These hidden objects are usually signified by a violet flower, making it at least a little easier to know when to use it. Jumping (or anything else for that matter) isn’t possible when shrunk, so you are sometimes required to remember where platforms are before making the leap.
Combat makes up the rest of the gameplay in Alice: Madness Returns. As you progress, you eventually acquire four different weapons to use: the Vorpal Blade, the Hobby Horse, the Pepper Grinder, and the Teapot Cannon. The Vorpal Blade and the Hobby Horse are used for close-range combat and the Pepper Grinder and Teapot Cannon are used to shoot enemies from afar. Essentially, both melee and ranged have a weaker but faster weapon and a slower but stronger weapon, allowing players to mix and match depending on group size and composition. Each weapon is also upgradeable with teeth picked up from the bodies of slain enemies and found in breakable objects strewn throughout the world and each weapon has four levels to work your way through.
The combat starts off very mashy (and doesn’t get too much better) but a certain element of strategy does arise once the game begins giving you groups of enemies to fight, especially when the types of enemies in the group are varied. It becomes a mental checklist of sorts, forcing you to pick certain enemies to focus on first before moving to the rest. A few of the fights were pretty tricky, requiring me to deftly pepper flying enemies while dodging the melee attacks of others on the ground. Fighting enemies never felt like great fun but the combat offered enough challenges and creative thinking to make it enjoyable.
The way the game world really comes to life is in the unique visual style that Spicy Horse went with. London is filled with dark, inky colors and foggy streets. Wonderland levels are varied going from a steampunk, Industrial-London feel to a floating castle of cards amidst a bright blue sky. Many characters are designed with exaggerated features, the Wonderland characters becoming absolutely crazy at times. Clever enemy designs, such as an Eastern themed level with samurai and daimyo wasps, are continually introduced. Comparisons to the Tim Burton Alice movie are not overly misplaced.
Alice herself is also very well-realized, using an appropriately proportioned character model with piercing green eyes and flowing locks of black hair. This hair is quite possible the best game hair ever made, flowing realistically and blowing about in the wind when floating across platforms. Not to be ignored are the beautiful dresses that Alice wears in her Wonderland outings. Each level has two different dresses, the first usually being the classic blue and white dress with the second matching the theme of the level a bit more closely.
Unfortunately, the visuals are also a place where one of the biggest problems with the game lies. As expected with the Unreal Engine, texture pop-in and fade-in happens constantly. Most of the posters or signs in the game are impossible to read until getting close to them, when the words then fade into a resolution that is readable. It doesn’t just happen during loading transitions; simply crossing a room can cause more pop-in to happen. Also, a lot of the textures really don’t look that great for a game of this caliber. Some are so muddied that they wouldn’t look out of place on a launch Xbox 360 game, something that is uncalled for in this day and age.
The other major problem with Alice: Madness Returns is in the level design. Most levels are entirely made up of alternating platforming and combat sequences. Little is done to change up the platforming throughout the game and while the combat becomes more interesting here and there, the majority of the fights are relatively easy. These levels also go on for quite some time, two to three hours of the same stuff over and over. Each new level is exciting for awhile but they all become slightly boring once you’ve spent so much time in them. More, shorter levels may have helped push it along but the best solution would have been to mix it up more. Some of the later levels add some minigames, such as a gorgeously rendered 2D mode, but these come too little, too late.
I had a good enough time with Alice: Madness Returns but I couldn’t help feeling that the actual look and style of the game was more enjoyable then the playing it sometimes. The dark London setting and the fantastical Wonderland settings are great setpieces to remember but those memories are paired with the sometimes painful gameplay I had to go through to finish those levels. The combat really shone during those intense battles with multiple enemy types but felt too repetitive when it was easy. Alice certainly isn’t for everyone, but if the visual style and flair is enough that you want to see the rougher parts of the game through, I encourage you to do so; it is a fantastic visual and mental experience that can hardly be matched in the world of gaming.
