American McGee's Alice

The Good
Put away your hash pipe, please. You won't need it to get a rush out of this game. American McGee's Alice plays like Dr. Seuss' worst nightmare, and perhaps, like Lewis Carroll's wildest ambitions. For anyone who's ever read the book, a whole new element comes to the character of Alice by playing this game. It could be viewed as a continuance of where "Through The Looking Glass" left off. Let's get down to business.

Built on the Quake III game engine, Alice takes that sharp system and pushes it to the max, with many effects unfound in Quake. If you stop drooling at the graphics, you'll notice the characters. Alice, now auburn haired and green eyed, wears an upside down horsehoe necklace and blood spatters on her apron. They never do come out. Guided and bemused by the Cheshire Cat, a scrappy looking feline with words of wit and wonder, she pursues the White Rabbit but becomes caught up in many different subplots.

Alice takes a brilliant new approach to what really is a third-person shooter game. An amazing story, mostly conjured up with help of the old books, and creatures and settings that are realistic (and fing scary enough) to keep you up nights. It doesn't get much better.

The Bad
There are a few more interactions that would have been nice to see, such as the choice-system seen in the old Windows game Titanic. You would choose what to reply, and based on that, your fate would be decided by the creatures you interacted with. That would require an expansion onto likely a second disk, but it would be worth it, just to give the player's mind a little more to chew on.

The Bottom Line*
Let's face it, kids who loved Alice In Wonderland, Disney-style, are not up for American McGee's Alice. If you're light hearted on blood and violence in your games, Alice will not be a favorite. But for those of you who like to do things the old fashioned way with a demonic twist, Alice is your meal ticket.

The Good
In the opening cutscene, we learn that Alice’s life has gone downhill since her initial forays into Wonderland. Orphaned by an accidental fire, Alice is now institutionalized in a catatonic state brought on by survivor’s guilt, clinging to a button-eyed white rabbit. But as Alice’s mind has changed, so too has Wonderland. The Red Queen has turned malevolent. Her Card Guard has imprisoned the people of Wonderland. The Mad Hatter has become uncomfortably curious about clockworks. And it’s up to Alice to make things right again.

American McGee’s Alice is a wildly inventive game that plays as a third person shooter, more arcade than adventure. American McGee’s Wonderland, is Carroll’s world reflected by a funhouse mirror. Familiar characters are stretched and twisted. White Rabbit embraces his rodent side. You can see the Card Guard's ribs beneath their garb. Alice notes that the Cheshire Cat has a touch of the mange. Alice herself has had a gothic makeover—dark hair, dark eyes, and a blood splattered outfit (with runes?). The locations are breathtaking, ranging from a sinister Skool to a chessboard city and even a bug’s eye view of the world.

What comes across, as far as level design, is American McGee’s respect for Alice’s world and his Burtonesque ability to turn it on its head. The Skool, for instance, is logically illogical including rooms that seem adjacent but are really floors apart. And everything moves. The sky in the Chessworld moves overhead. The buildings in the first levels seem to dance. The environmental effects add realism to the surreal.

As I mentioned, at its heart, Alice is an arcade game. Unlike the acrobatic Ms. Croft, Alice’s moves are simplified. But she can still swing on vines, cling to ledges and hoist herself over obstacles. With abundant jumping puzzles, the designers have kindly added ghostly footprints to indicate where Alice will land. Alice’s weapons also have a targeting reticule (which almost automatically aims).

Speaking of weapons (called toys), Alice begins the game with the Vorpal Knife. This is the only weapon that doesn’t deplete Alice’s will (the equivalent of mana, magic, etc.) and it remains useful throughout the game. Later on Alice acquires diverse toys such as the piercing playing cards, the flame throwing jack-in-the-box, and the Demon Dice. Most weapons have a primary and secondary attack option and each one is visually impressive. Toys reappear throughout the game and every time Alice reacquires a toy it grows in power.

As I mention above, Alice has to keep track of her Sanity (a red life bar) and her Will (a blue mana bar). Power-ups appear throughout the game and she can collect essence from her defeated foes. In addition to the toy and life power-ups, there are several special power-ups available for the observant player.

But what would this game be without enemies. In addition to figuring out which former friends are now foes, Alice also has miniature Jabberwockies, Snarks, and rogue chessman among others in the villains’ roster. Finally, Alice has several bosses to deal with. These bosses can be incredibly challenging and (for the most part) it’s up to Alice to out-battle them rather than figuring out the “trick” to beating them.

Lastly, while some reviewers have emphasized that this game is style over substance, I have to disagree mainly because the style is the substance. Not only does McGee offer us a twisted version of Wonderland and the characters, but also the game twists in on itself. You can’t tell me after seeing the resolution of the White Queen level that there isn’t more here than candy for the eye or music for the ear.

Bring on American McGee’s Oz! (or Narnia-- wouldn't that be interesting?)

The Bad
Is there anything I didn’t like about this game?

The graphics were great, except for the somewhat blurry ending.

Voice acting was pretty good, except for a few characters.

The Bottom Line
A wicked romp through Wonderland.

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.