American McGee's Alice

The Good
There are many things to like about this game. First off, the graphics are just drop-dead gorgeous. The scenery is as spaced out as one would expect from a game with a knife-wielding Alice. From the lush outdoors to the spooky buildings, the graphics are always a pleasure on the eye. Secondly, the levels are great. Every level has its own unique graphics, and design, giving the player the feeling of being totally immersed in another world. One of the best levels, for instance, is one where the surfaces of the walls are like mirrors, reflecting other walls. Thirdly, the controls are great: it doesn't take very long to learn how to move about and fight. Finally, the game's difficulty slowly increases as you get more used to controls and gameplay. For instance, the first few levels pits you against cards that die with one or two hits. Later however, you battle rooks and knights, each of which attack in different ways, and require a different amount of hits to dispatch.

The Bad
The requirements of the game are a let down. The first time I played it, I reached a point after which none of the game's sprites would show up. So everything was white, except for the levels. This made playing difficult. Of course that was because my video card was a stinky one. After getting a new system, however, the game screams to be played. Also, at times, the controls can be over-sensitive. This is esp. frustrating when negotiating jumps: sometimes you jump onto a platform, only to land near the edge. Desperate to avoid falling off, you quickly move back, only to accidentally run off the back.

The Bottom Line
The gameplay is good, the voice acting is great, and the graphics are superb. This game will definitely appeal to fans for 3rd-person perspective 3D games, and maybe even the RPGers (I mostly play RPGs myself). Words cannot describe how great a gaming experience this was, esp. since I'm playing it for the umpteenth time.

The Good
American McGee's Alice is a fascinating game - at least it is for me. But where does this fascination come from?

The first and foremost thing about this game is its atmosphere and style. In my opinion it's sheer genius to expand the nice Alice in Wonderland story into a tale of death and murder, blood and torture, and pure paranoia - a tale for grown-ups. But it is one thing to have a good idea, and something completely different to make a good game of it. But here, the designers did.

The level designs and graphics all resemble the "known" Wonderland, but this time a Wonderland gone really bad. The game throws levels at you that vary from stunning beauty to mind-twisting surreality. This alone kept me playing, just to see what crazy stuff the designers had up their sleeves, yet. And I wasn't disappointed when with the conquering of the heart queen's castle near the end game, another visual blast was waiting. The enemy and weapon design also fit well here, both adding to this wonderful dark and paranoid atmosphere this game delivers.

Speaking of enemies, I really liked my cannon fodder, as no two enemy kinds are the same to kill. There are the lava monsters that are fluid and easy to kill when they come out of their lava pit, but turn to stone and, therefore, get harder to kill by the second. There are those little devils that just take one hit, but come in hordes. There are those fish pests that charge at you while swimming and throw acid and lava when you're standing at the shore. And the list goes on. Every enemy kind is well thought out and has its strengths and weaknesses to be discovered. And when you found out how to kill them more or less easily, they will team up to make your life harder again. The same goes for the boss fights, pure adrenaline.

Speaking of weapons, those all are Alice's toys gone dangerous. There's her cards, her cricket bat, her jack-in-the-box, her dice, and so on. They all kill the enemies in two different modes, can be used short or long range, are toys of single or mass destruction. It's part of the fun to try out all these funny goodies and see what they can do to your opposition. And you should know your weaponry well, as there will be fights that are impossible to win with one weapon, but easy going with another one or a combination of them.

The Bad
Some things hinder this game from becoming a true classic, though.

If you put aside the covers of cool design and style, a linear action platformer is left for you to play. A good one, that is, but somehow the actual gameplay can't really keep up with the presentation. The level designs vary in quality, top notch levels make room for huge mazes with spawning enemies that are an exercise in anger management. Furthermore, the cool background of Alice freeing her own fantasy world of her problems and sense of guilt isn't developed well within the game. Here and in those enemy-ridden mazes you will most painfully notice that the developers of this game have a history of developing 3D shooters.

The controls sometimes annoyed me, especially the jumping didn't work as expected, more than once it wasn't clear to me whether Alice can grab hold of an edge in front of her or not. Falling down into nirvana too often is the result of all this.

Last thing, fighting enemies it's sometimes not obvious whether you're doing damage or not. Especially when battling the centipede boss monster, I spend half an hour throwing everything at him until I finally looked up in a FAQ that there's a special area where he can be hit.

The Bottom Line
I love this game, no doubt about that. But still, I sometimes dream about it done right from start to finish. With a good storyteller to develop Alice's problems, with a huge Wonderland for Alice to roam freely, maybe with an RPG-like experience and questing system. The sky was the limit...

But heck, a sequel is in the making, let's see what they'll do with this legacy.

The Good

Alice has been living for some years in an orphan house, laying immobile on her bed, staring at the ceiling with empty eyes. Pressed against her chest, she has a stuffed bunny rabbit, the only thing to survive a fire to which she lost her house and her parents.
One stormy night, the rabbit suddenly speaks: "Save us, Alice!"
Next thing she knows, she's falling through the rabbit hole, down into her own mind, into the Wonderland.
Alice will find a dark parody of the fantastic place she loved so much as a child. She's asked to save the Wonderland by its tormented inhabitants.

Soon enough, she'll learn her own sanity is at stake.

First, I assume you live in planet Earth, meaning that at least ONCE in your life you read, someone read to you, watched Disney's cartoon, or by any other mean know about Alice In Wonderland.

Legend has it that Alice In Wonderland is a story that Lewis Carroll made up on the fly, dedicated to a girl he loved —Alice Lidell—, and it was meant as a timekiller for spring walks in which he allowed himself to level with the child within himself. Or maybe the guy was a clever pedophile and used the funny stories as a bait to lure his prey in. It depends on who you ask, you know how people is, what with the internet and all.
In any case, Alice In Wonderland eventually became a classic bedtime story, and it's considered by some as a masterpiece in absurd humor as well; so much so, that Carroll wrote a sequel of sorts called Through The Looking Glass, in which he puts a much stronger emphasis in the absurd, with a more intellectual-ish storytelling.

American McGee is, according to my researches, either an amazingly talented artist and one of the masterminds involved in the design of the monster hit game Quake III: Arena, or a pompous self-absorbed snot who designed a couple of mediocre levels and got fired from id. Again, take your pick.

American McGee's Alice is a 3rd-person perspective action game based in the Quake III engine, with lots of shooting, a healthy dose of jumping puzzles, a moody, dark atmosphere, and lots of references to both Carroll's stories.
These stories are especially loved by pseudo-intellectual teenagers all over the world, like, artsy goths and such, which makes McGee's version like a wet dream come true, what with the grim-looking red-haired Alice wearing a blood-stained apron, and holding a knife with a blade as long as her own arm, and all.
Most fights end up with more or less explicit shots of gore that, while admittedly gratuitous, don't feel all that wrong in the general atmosphere. It's certainly the only choice you'll ever have to slash a poker card in half and watch its guts coming out as it sprays blood all over the floor, I can tell you that much.

Even though Alice works fine as a regular action game, I strongly suggest to get a nice edition of both Carroll's classics (you can find them everywhere in the internet) and read them before playing the game, to catch all the funny references. It's worth it.

So, the game.
The first thing that SHOCKED me about Alice is the visual aspect: The graphics are simply superb, enough can't be said on this matter. Everything from the sweet background image of the main menu, all the way to the design of the bizarre last boss, is the true definition of eye-candy.
The environments are stuffed with fancy special effects and all kinds of small details that bring to life one of the most imaginative gameworlds I've ever seen. Every level is radically different from the previous one, and they all look equally good. Often times, I found myself just wandering around aimlessly, only to enjoy every little detail around.

It's worth to mention that I played this game in a PC equipped with a Celeron 366 CPU, 128MB of RAM, and a TNT2 M64 video card, and with all the details set at top, the game performs quite smoothly, stuttering only in a couple of really crowed fights.

The characters match the gameworld perfectly. Take for example the Cheshire Cat, with his sickly thin body, his abnormally long neck, and his pirate earring; or the freaky children that wander around at the skool, sporting different metallic torture devices attached to their heads, with their constant and disturbing laughter.
Much like it happens with the backgrounds, almost every single living character that shows up is a work of art in its design; the bosses deserving a special mention for their impressive and threatening looks and, often, their massive size.

Regarding gameplay, the best part would be the combat sequences, not only because the control interface is simple and smooth -after all, it's Quake III from a 3rd person perspective, with the added attractive of a smart crosshair-, but the weapons are really original, and a pleasure to watch in action; they're all hand-made toys, twisted to have some lethal effect or other, including a deck of cards that explode in contact and a jack-in-the-box that summons small fire-spitting flying demons.

The jumping puzzles, on the other hand, while at times are presented in rather imaginative designs, for the most part are forgettable --if not plain annoying.

The voice acting, at least the spanish dub, is really good. Considering how lame spanish voice acting usually is, this cast was a pleasant surprise; even more so considering the game's story is not that relevant.

The music tracks exhale a strong feeling of magnificence and melancholy, which works great to support the dark and oppressive atmosphere the graphics depict; with some particularly strong moments, like the Lake of Tears.

The story is presented with in-game graphics cutscenes, and while it's not ground breaking Pulitzer-material, it's certainly enjoyable, especially with the aforementioned voice acting; and even more so when it starts becoming clearer that the characters of the stories are mirroring people Alice knows from real life, and the whole adventure is revealed as a metaphor of her own fight to regain sanity.
The conversation with the Caterpillar has to be one of my favorite moments in the game.

The Bad

The main complaint I have about this game is its linearity.
I enjoyed playing the game, and I'm pretty sure I WILL play it again soon, but I definitely would have liked a more appealing challenge, maybe in the form of puzzles, or even some adventuring to do (and no, running errands for some Papa Smurf lookalike does not count as "adventure").
Basically, all you have to do throughout the game is jump from platform to platform, swing on some ropes, climb some ledges, and -of course- kill pretty much everything that moves. Every now and then you'll be dealt a tete-a-tete with some large, bad-ass foe, which you'll have to spank for a while in order to move on.

Rinse and repeat.

The enemy AI doesn't exactly shine, and fights are only a challenge when you're heavily outnumbered, and in a couple of boss fights.
The platform puzzles can get quite annoying since Quake III was clearly not designed for this kind of gameplay, and getting Alice to land and stand on certain especially small platforms can become too tricky to call it "fun".

The levels give a first impression of being gigantic worlds with lots of paths to explore, but this is yet another title that fools you on that regard, quickly revealing itself as a strictly one-lane ride. There's always the one path to walk, and there are just a few secret areas, that aren't that secret either.

If you missed any of the dialogues, it really doesn't matter, since the story is purely cosmetic. The dialogues play in cutscenes with no player intervention, and they won't be of any real help. You don't even need to remember anything that was said; you just wait for them to shut up, and then keep doing your jumpin' n' shootin' thing.

One final personal quirk: I didn't like the part they gave to the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. It's true, their scene is very effective in its attempt at being disturbing, but those are by far my favorite characters in the original story, and I think they would've deserved something better, something that made them truly memorable --like they did with the Cat.

The Bottom Line

I loved this game. It's all linear, the enemies are really dumb, the platforming can become infuriating, and whether you follow the story or not won't make a difference in the end; but I really enjoyed playing it.

If nothing else, the graphics alone are worth giving this title a try, characters and gameworld are well-designed and they're different enough from one another as to assure you will never get bored with the views. Also, the game performs incredibly smoothly, even in the lowest-range PC.

The story, while practically useless, is enjoyable, and those who own both books -or at least remember the stories and the characters- surely will enjoy this därk version.

Bottom line, the game is fun to play and nice to look at, and following the story adds a whole new dimension. It successfully managed to get me to play all the way to the ending without losing interest at any moment. Once I finished the game, even though the final animated sequence is honestly awful (which is especially sad, considering how good the intro is), I felt satisfied. What else can a gamer ask for?