Alice: Madness Returns

I played the original American McGee’s Alice back in the early 2000s when I was easily impressed by just about any 3-D game. It was probably a $5 bargain-bin CD-ROM from CompUSA, and I managed to finish it even though it was pretty bad.

This sequel is definitely much slicker looking, but beneath the goth-girl art direction it’s still a fairly uninspired platform game. The biggest problem is straightforward and boring level design. For example, you are given the ability to shrink down, but you never use this ability for anything except walking into secret keyhole rooms. This is the sort of mechanism that a Mario game would build an entire world around.

And then there’s the combat, which consists of locking on to a target and mashing the left mouse button. Half the time the camera is positioned in such a way that you can’t see what you are doing anyway. There are a couple of larger enemies that offer a little skill-based battling, but most of the time combat is just an annoyance.

The game really wants you to care about its story, but it’s just an incoherent, mumbled mess of found “memories” and illustrated cut scenes. In the end, the whole affair feels like a Psychonauts rip-off, and, in hindsight, that game wasn’t really that great either.