Alice: Madness Returns

Welcome back to the world of insanity with Alice: Madness Returns. Yet again, the player finds themselves controlling Alice as Wonderland is being changed by the madness-plagued Alice; reality and madness blend together to make two completely separate worlds that are completely reliant upon each other to maintain the mental balance within our troubled heroine. With stark contrasting visuals, interesting battle mechanics and a storyline that is actually rather interesting, this looked like it could be a truly great game, marred by the fact that faults in the game pull the player straight out of the experience of the game and can often leave the player very irritated and unsatisfied. Hold onto your top hat, tumble down the rabbit hole and get ready, once again, to explore the mad world of Alice: Madness Returns.

Parts of the original Lewis Carroll’s inventive story are seen in Alice: Madness Returns, but are filtered and reshaped to an extent that makes them new and interesting all over again. The story takes place 10 years after the original game ends, and this time we find Alice trying to recover her repressed memories from the trauma of having lost all of her family in a house fire. Her madness is still as strong as in the first game, and this adds to the confusion she has over the terrible events that happened to her family. She has spent the last decade in an insane asylum and now she finds herself released into the care of a psychiatrist that is attempting to free her of the outlandish hallucinations that plague her. Alice is certain there is a mystery cause to her family’s death; in order to find this cause Alice will venture forth from the dark and dreary streets of London to the bright visuals of Wonderland,  a world that is beginning to fall apart. The story itself is full of riddles and surprises that will keep players on their toes throughout the gam, while.characters from the original make return appearances for fans of the first Alice. Although their motives will have changed since the original, it is handled in a way that still fits into the original storyline. For fans of the original these new interactions with previous characters will create quite the entertaining piece within the story.

Don't ever tell Alice a dress makes her look fat!

The journey to discover the truth within Alice’s memories takes many twists and turns. Reality and madness mix in the most unusual ways as she unravels her shattered memories in her attempt to discover the truth, and to keep from spoiling the ending the truth behind the tale is almost as insane as Alice’s shattered hallucinations of Wonderland. This story is full of twists as figures from her past hold keys to unraveling what actually happened on that terrible night where she lost her entire family. Trust no one in this story - not even Alice’s mind - as you traverse these experiences to learn just what happened.

Alice: Madness Returns takes the elements found in many of the best platforming games out there and combines third-person weapon-based action that is very reminiscent of the controls of some of the most popular platformers out there. The combat is very fluid as you are able to seamlessly swap from one weapon to the next with no stutters or stops. Dodging is fast and has a neat graphic of butterflies swarming as you move to a safer position from enemies. The weapons each have their own strengths that help to make an organic system of combos between them all. The Hobby Horse is your power weapon for breaking armor or knocking enemies over, while the Vorpal Blade is your fast weapon used to open up enemies in a hurry. A pepper grinder is your gun-type weapon, and using each of these in succession seamlessly is easy and necessary for many of the different enemies. There are also rabbit clock bombs that can be used to distract enemies enabling for some strategy in combat. All in all each weapon looks visually appealing and has a great effect in battling the troubled denizens of Wonderland.

What? You said pass the pepper...

Alice is capable of some very fun acrobatics in this game. Players will navigate their way through Wonderland utilizing her jumps (double and triple), shrinking  and will also be able to float as they maneuver the obstacles and puzzles that block the path to the objectives in this game. Shrinking gives the player Shrink Sense that has to be utilized regularly to find hidden paths and secret messages that give hints to defeating puzzles.  Finding hidden paths and items adds a slight level of challenge to this game as they are sometimes cleverly hidden, so it pays to explore in this game as you never know what may be just behind the hidden door.

Hysteria Mode is another cool feature in combat. Anytime the player gets down to only one life bar they have the option to enter hysteria mode. In this altered state you are invincible and do more damage, but you will not collect the precious teeth you need to upgrade weapons in this mode. It's extremely handy in a tight situation and when it is utilized it can often save the player from an untimely demise.

Fear the woman that carries a  horse head stick that's covered in blood!

The visuals in this game are very well thought out. The contrast between the dreary run down streets of London make an incredible impact with the surreal visuals within the Wonderland maps. The most impressive visuals are within Wonderland as there are all kinds of images to draw the player into the world as long as the game is running smoothly.  The little details really catch the eye with changes in Alice’s clothing and how the weapons change with each upgrade. It was changes and details like these that really held my interest in many of the levels - I actually found myself wanting to see the next appearance for weapons more than what the new battle damages would be. This is rare for me and it was a nice change from just wanting to have super strong weapons. The cut scenes also are an interestingly take on stylized vibrant colored two-dimensional images that appear to be taken straight from printed pages.

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Just look at that hang time!

While the beauty and generally good battle scenes are well done Alice: Madness Returns has several drawbacks. There are several graphical areas that are inconsistent and some areas have a rough texture coating. There are also several graphical items that had such a sense of oddness to them that I found myself wondering if they were meant to be done this way. The pig snouts that you must pepper for bonus items have an odd blue explosion every time that just isn’t to the same quality of the rest of the game. Now was this done on purpose or just overlooked? I couldn’t tell you but it’s little things like this that start to take away from this game. There were also several glitches within the game that at first were easily ignored, but as the game went on became insanely infuriating. The biggest annoyance for me was on a level where Alice had to jump on invisible platforms while remaining within the light in order to keep your health from dropping. To make this platform appear you must place a bomb on a switch, but for me the platform would only appear once out of every ten tries. This section here took me far too long to complete just because of this little glitch. This wasn’t the only time I had this problem either, and these glitches were enough to make me want to stop playing on several occasions.

The other glitches I experienced were jumping on platforms and hitting an invisible wall where there shouldn’t be one, forcing me to fall or hang in midair till I tired of this. When these glitches were paired with camera angles that all too often move to the worst position during key moments in puzzle solving, this can make the game grate massively on the player’s nerves. Now the camera was decent for the most part during the game as it is movable during normal scenes and battle scenes, but when locking on to enemy targets it can get a little tricky. It wasn’t a bad targeting system, it just had a tendency to swap targets when it wasn’t intended. The camera only became locked in certain scenes and when it was a bad angle where time was an issue is when this problem of camera angles really showed.

Don't call Alice chicken!

The soundtrack to this game is very interesting. They did a great job of selecting musical scores that add tension in just the right place within the games' story. The sound effects are also pretty good and blended well with the action that was going on. I found myself listening to several of the background songs while just looking at the interesting visuals on several occasions. Although I will add that in some of the longer levels the background music could get to be a bit annoying.

The characters in the story are decent at best. The voiceover performance of Alice just seems a bit dry, but I will say that it does add to the creepiness of her being insane in several instances. The supporting cast of characters was almost more interesting to me than Alice herself; the ways that they make Alice appear to be the sanest person in Wonderland was not lost on me and actually I found this to be as interesting as the story itself. The supporting characters do add to fleshing out the story and create a good bit more interest in what is happening.

Just another Saturday night

This game takes some time to finish, and this becomes a double edged sword sweeping down to cut off your enjoyment of this game. The longer sessions you play of this game can start to feel repetitive with the gameplay. You shrink to find clues, hidden doors, and invisible platforms.  Then you will traverse some challenge of platforms, solve puzzles, and figure out a riddle. This is followed up with fighting some group of enemies.  Rinse, repeat, then do it all over again. After doing this a few times the enemies and backgrounds may look different, but the gameplay just remains redundant.

Which came first the chick or Alice's knife?

  Another problem I had with this game is that the player can't save the game at anytime they want. This means you must wait on an auto-save feature in order to have your progress saved and not have to replay the same areas. The auto-save points are available at decent areas, but this caused me to have to replay several areas a few times because of death or the fact that I just had to turn the game off for a while and didn't have time to play to the next save area. I know it's a mundane complaint, but being able to save progress at anytime is a feature that most games offer and I found myself wishing for this feature a number of times in this game.

 Alice: Madness Returns features some of the most appealing visuals offered in a platform action game. With the ability to explore hidden areas and upgrade weapons this game is very interesting, but the inconsistencies and problems with glitches begin to take a toll on the player after a while. This pulls the player out of the experiences that Alice: Madness Returns has to offer all too often reminding the player that they are merely playing a game. Without these flaws this could have been a truly immersive game that could have been on the same level with many of the platforming classic franchises so many people love, but unfortunately with these problems it’s just a memorable look at a game that takes a spooky look at this classic story of Alice and her Wonderland. If there is a patch to this game fixing these problems this game will be a solid 8 out of 10, but until then it's a 6.5 out of 10 due to the sheer free frequency of these problems.

Written by: Paul Miller

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