thePULSEOff with Her Head!
By Tom Hodgson
Alice: Madness Returns is the long-awaited sequel to American McGee’s Alice, a title which over a decade ago reinvented Lewis Carroll’s vision of the curious little girl who fell down the rabbit hole. Following “Through the Looking-Glass,” the game dropped off in both tact and grace, putting the rabbit hole inside of Alice’s head.
The sole survivor after the rest of her family is burned alive, she is reduced to an incredibly trite, pedestrian casualty of the American psyche. She becomes an institutionalized 20something trapped in her own mind, constantly experiencing vivid and disturbing scenes from a violent and macabre Wonderland, one gasping for air from the recesses of her sound thoughts. In order to restore sanity, she saves the darkened place from the grasps of chaos and disorder and all was well again down the rabbit hole.
The Madness Returns, all right, without much reasoning beyond “Welp, it’s happening again,” a deeply unfulfilling explanation similar to a movie ending that serves no other purpose than to make way for a sequel. This is just the fruitless beginning to a story I’m pretty sure doesn’t even know what fruit is to call itself fruitless.
For an incredibly underwhelming game, there is an overwhelming lack of cohesion outside of the linear progression of the levels. You’re never quite sure why anything is ever happening and aren’t given much reason to care. Why am I fighting this creature? What relevance does it have to the Alice in Wonderland lore?
The only true constant with Madness Returns is the confusion it provides and the interest you notice slowly draining any feasible enjoyment found from progressing through bland voice actors and mindless “kill a horde, unlock a door” battles.
And while the ambience of an LSD-inspired dreamscape manages to draw you in with its fanciful appeal, all the gaudy, whimsical frills of Wonderland’s twisted decadence can’t manage to save you from this game, let alone save the game from itself. Collecting items and playing through mindless battles can only take so much consideration before they require none at all.
The story unfolds at a criminally leisurely pace, not to be confused with a methodical pace like that found in Taxi Driver. It is remedial and made all the more difficult to trudge through with the accompaniment of lackluster voice acting and senseless one-button attacks. Ultimately along your path, you collect Alice’s memories ~ scattered pieces of a fragile mental puzzle which detail the causes of her dementia. At no time does the game allow you to go back and pick up the pieces of yours, though.
Alice: Madness Returns is part incredibly average hack-and-slash, part incredibly average platformer, sutured at that seams with a plot that could only dream of being as average and overrun with graphical inconsistencies. If this title were released on the Nintendo 64, it would have been ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the rabbit’s pocket watch has ticked for over a decade and the Madness Returns just in time to be irrelevant in an age of gaming where options are so plentiful, mediocrity such as this game gets swept away as an afterthought.
Rating: 66%
