Alice: Madness Returns

While Alice: Madness Returns has a number of problems, its artistic side and its genuine concept calls off the bad. This is a game that truly could have outshined American McGee's Alice with its interesting production values, but instead it leaves us slightly disappointed.

Why such a focus on action when the control scheme can't really handle that emphasis? Why not do a lot more with the atmosphere and storyline? Why does it take the story so long to get anywhere? These are questions I didn't want to ask.

Madness Returns is in a tricky position. It could never offer pistol-quick mechanics because of the character design and it often feels like a chore to finish a stage. You'll also probably get pretty tired of finding and shooting switches to reveal a hidden platform, or slogging through another round of five or six enemies. Yet it dares to be different, so if you're happy to admire it for is own sake then you should find some fun amongst the insanity. [August 2011 p74]

Alice: Madness Returns isn't a bad game; it's a game that isn't quite good enough. Tighter controls, a little more testing, and either much less or much better combat would've turned Madness Returns into one of the all-time greats. Right now, it's picturesque but annoying. It's fun to look at, some of the stages are OK, and there's a lot of variety both in the level design and in the basic gameplay, but as a game, it's frequently half-baked.

American McGee, I really wanted to love Alice: Madness Returns, truly I did. And while I can say that in it there were instances of fun and moments of wonder, these were eclipsed by an excess of repetition, a surfeit of crummy-looking textures and a general lack of polish. And so I admit to you with a heart full of regret, that Madness Returns has failed to live up to either my dreams or its own potential.

Overall, Alice: Madness Returns is a nice little action platformer. It's not without its problems, and the levels do tend to drag on for a while, but the core mechanics are strong enough than genre fans should give it a look.

Alice: Madness Returns is stylistically gorgeous, with its crazy characters and a great environmental design. It's a shame that everything is spoiled by huge technical issues, bad graphics and a great lack of variety.

All the trudging, mundane puzzles, and hours spent on air vents are worth it at the end when secrets are revealed and the scattered memories all start to make sense.

Far from a bad game. Stellar art and a darkly unique stage help set it apart from the brown and bloom of this console generation, and Spicy Horse should no doubt be commended for their approach to an underfed genre in the HD-gen platformer.

Madness Returns is a fantastic, alternative vision of Wonderland, full of secrets and fascinating creatures. However, its gameplay doesn't evolve from the first chapter and tends to be repetitive.

There's a lot to like with Alice: Madness Returns, but regretfully there is more that needs work to make it even more likable. Had this had a few more months to stew in beta and the release date pushed back into the holiday season then maybe these little things (camera, AI and repetitive enemies) could have been worked out. As it is, the game is a little broken, but certainly not as severely as the main character.

I'd have liked the adventure to have been trimmed of fat, the combat is at times extremely irritating, and the art design far exceeds the technical prowess on show, but at its core Alice: Madness Returns is an imaginative romp through a world that's clearly been designed by some incredibly creative minds.

Playing Alice: Madness Returns isn't as exciting as looking at it, but you'll still enjoy getting lost in this twisted fantasy adventure.

Alice Madness Returns is a beatiful game. The beginning is great but after the first few hours Alice Madness Returns becomes too repetitive. In some situations the gameplay is only a mess.

What starts out as a promising romp through a demented Wonderland devolves into a few good ideas stretched across redundant gameplay.

Provides a visually interesting world, with competent gameplay mechanics, but it ultimately fails to completely draw the player into the depths of its promised insanity to satisfaction.

The weird setting around alice's wonderland is pretty cool, but the gameplay has no stunning features and is nowhere special. The graphics aren't state of the art, however, the atmosphere and the sound effects are pretty nice.

Alice: Madness Returns isn't as good as we expected. It has a lot of style and very good visual deisgn, but its long main adventure becomes very repetitive too soon.

Presents a fantastically imagined vision of Wonderland full of secrets, collectables, and wondrous areas of classic platforming to explore. But through questionable level design, graphical inconsistency, and repetitive gameplay, I was pulled out of the experience more than I would have liked.

Insipidly competent but, sadly, just a bit of a yawn to play. [Aug 2011, p.84]

Alice: Madness Returns is interesting, visually stunning and inviting. Some of the gameplay elements excites in its pure form, but combat does seem ridgid and sometimes random. It's close, but not quite the cigar for Mr. McGee.

It's a game for platform lovers, gothic and macabre environments, but decide whether to buy or not with caution.

The problem is that, even at its best, it's an 11-year-old best. [Aug 2011, p.114]

A moderately fun action-adventure title that creates an interesting, albeit confusing experience to play through, which just needed a little more polish, spark, and character progression to make it great.

Ten years. That's what it took for a follow-up to the original American McGee's Alice to be born. A great day for the fans, who will immediately recognize the trashy-gore touch of the developer. They won't be disappointed by the singular atmosphere, which captures imagination right from the start of the game. But its terrible lack of polish and technical shortcomings may also frighten a lot of people. The fans will probably forgive those, but others may not.

At the end of the day, Alice: MR has a lot of good ideas from a lot of other good games, but never really executes them as well as the originals did. Unless you're a hardcore fan of the original, or a dedicated platforming junkie, you'll want to skip this return to wonderland.

Alice is a competent action-platformer with richly imaginative worlds steeped in allusive imagery. Half of the fun is seeing how American McGee has transformed the beloved stories into a wicked journey that nicely complements and embellishes its source material. Alice: Madness Returns can be darkly engrossing, but also, a devestating reminder that more is not always better.

Aside from intense boredom, you'll also have to compete with shonky mechanics and intense frustration. [Issue#207, p.86]

It is, however, a game with truly stunning production values. There's some great animation, fantastic voice acting, and the levels have jaw-dropping visual design. It's also painfully repetitive.

Quotation forthcoming.