Contains spoilers?

Nope/ Slightly / Some of them / Get out of here!

Alice Madness Returns was on my mind for a long time: it felt like an unfinished book you never feel you have the time to read. When I finally put myself on it, became more tedious than I never expected. I have mixed feelings about it, because it’s not a bad game, in fact I enjoyed a lot of things about it, but it has so many wrongs some time is required to explain every point. This review pretends to be a post-beating one, so it assumes you have finished Alice Madness Returns because will rush into spoilers like hell.

The premise we firstly meet looks marvellous: a more decrepit Alice who has lost her family because of a fire in her home. Everybody’s pointing at her in a pity, “Poor desolated girl, just became an orphan” or even some dare to think she provoked the fire purposely. Her parents and sister are not the only thing she has lost, sanity is on her way too. We see Alice coming and returning from the Wonderland, the only place where she feels strong and confident, despite of the fact this fantastic world is also going down with the apparition of an infernal train. In the real world she’s weak, miserable and desolated but in her mind she’s still capable of fighting somehow.

Welcome back to Wonderland!

Keeping the chat about Wonderland, its beauty is more than well deserved: we can see the magnificence of the whole place, packed up in a platform way. The game engine, Unreal Engine, did his job well in Alice Madness Returns: everything is visually amazing, even the creepy parts of that imaginary world. It’s filled with people who we already have met before, like the Mad Hatter or the Caterpillar. Their personalities excel at the performance they are expected to make: the Hatter only real problem is the lack of tea. Anything else is just a fly, even the destruction of the whole Wonderland. Alice will seek help in these weird and arrogant creatures, avoiding the real trouble, herself.

Not so powerful in the streets, right?

Talking about the gameplay, Alice Madness Returns offers a smooth and fluid combat system, complemented with such a wide range of tools like the Hammer, Bunny-Bombs, Tea Pot or the Shrink-Potion. In order to not getting bored of the extremely large number of combats we will experience in-game, these tools come in handy to test new combos and fight different patterned enemies, not to mention the ability to unlock hidden paths to get collectibles. Despite of this positive feedback, Alice chore controls tend to fail way too often. Sometimes I found myself running in a direction without pressing any key, sometimes the jumps direction were way too imprecise or the camera was simply terrible. I even experienced some frame-crashing often, becoming tedious when happened at half jumping.

Totally loved the style of these posters

On another hand, it was nice that the game tried to extract the player from the classic control mechanics with minigames like the oriental 2d run or the totally unnecessary pinball with the doll’s head. Problem is, however, that despite of the efforts invested to make these different pluses they felt unfinished and buggy. Don’t blame me, I loved the idea of the 2d part, but it really felt like it required more time to be polished. And the “pinball” part… Well… Just… Why?

Overall, by the way, what I hated the most was the game design.

Why is the game design so terrible, you ask?

In a game company the task of the game designer is to ensure the product gets a nice flow and that the game doesn’t exploit any aspect that could affect the player experience. Well, in Alice Madness Returns there is such an enormous quantity of mistakes that makes the player get tired of playing. The first of them is the overuse of the platform system: 90% of the adventure is jumping around invisible or moving platforms, so ends becoming boring, exhaustive. On top of that, there are a few puzzle designs that repeat themselves along the whole game. Do you remember the one that requires gathering some cubes and then putting them back within many moves? Doing it once is perfect. Two is rather unpleasant. More than three is just wrong. To be honest, I became far from happy of the ‘leave bomb in a platform and run to the other’ platform trick. Felt like I was using it since the first level until the last one (and I truly did).

The design with enemies marks another tick that makes the experience worse: the game presents a new type of enemy. It’s strong, and alone gives a tough fight. But what happens? We keep having encounters with it, gathered by more enemies, sometimes even more of the same class. And we have to beat them all to progress in the adventure. Both spamming enemies and making them able to stop your progress are things that ruin Alice Madness Returns little by little. Or have you forgotten the Colossal Ruin?

This motherf-

Now I would like to talk about the collectibles: memories, bottles, glasses… A well developed idea to gather Alice’s shattered memories. Every collected piece led us to a special fragment of dialog with exclusive information. At the beginning of the game I gave my best to take every one of them, but some are so tricky to get eventually I gave up. Also, having no real reward for getting all of them (achievement maybe, but not in Steam) is more than enough for a stop in trying to collect the memories. Overall they are a nice addition, but most players will soon or later forget about them.

The music is incredible. I won’t ever dismiss this statement. Alice Madness Returns original soundtrack has some magical pieces that will help us to immerse in this new creepy Wonderland, like this one that played when doing the path to the Queen’s Domains, in the Castle of Cards.

Magical, right? Some songs are creepy, some have this soft, warm touch. I like all of them, despite sometimes tend to become repetitive when the zone is too long (the Oriental one and the House of Dolls felt extremely long and repetitive).

Creepy but… Fascinating

Speaking of difficulty, I found no sense in having the option of changing it. Why do I want the nightmare/normal/easy experience if there are no rewards about it? Not to brag or anything but what’s exactly the point on beating the game in hard difficulty then? The feeling of victory? Nah, this is way wrong. The game is exactly the same in each mode, it’s just we’ll die faster and enemies will be tougher.

Jumping straight to the final boss, I’m still not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s a nice plot twist that the therapist was who did everything, but on the other… The fight is not at the level one should expect for a final battle in the pilot wagon of the infernal drake. The combat relies on spamming enemies while fighting the boss hands… Wow, never seen such level of creativity in the industry of videogames! Despite the fight is uncomfortable, I was expecting a final phase. Defeating the therapist by just shooting at the tongue felt like something unfinished: what about a final strike, giving Alice her moment of joyness and victory? When I was expecting a kill or be killed stage, the boss just went down, defeated. Guess I should’ve felt relieved.

Despite of the disappointing final battle, I liked the end of Alice Madness Returns: the Wonderland will keep existing, and the lonely girl will still be strong inside her mind, locked away from the dangers of the real life. The final view of the city mixed with Wonderlands is one that will be hardly forgotten, giving an end to a long, frustrating but rewarding travel.

What a nice picture to end this adventure with!

Ah, one more thing: don’t get fooled by the “New Game +” label. It’s the same game but keeping the weapon upgrades and the collectibles gathered. Not real changes there.