American McGee's Alice
PC/Sony PlayStation 3
Developer: Rogue Entertainment
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Rated: M for Mature
Released: 2000/2011
Completed: 18 June 2015
You know those games that you remember loving until you go back and play them years later? American McGee's Alice is the posterchild for those games.
Taking characters and settings from Lewis Carroll's beloved tales, McGee put a twisted, macabre spin on it - not unlike Tim Burton's gothic versions of other people's work - and made a psychological horror action-platformer sequel of sorts. Artistically, the game is brilliant. Ironically, it's far better than Burton's take on the material more than a decade later. As a game, it's more frustrating than fun.
In my recent review for Deadly Premonition, I noted that games should not be reviewed solely on their technical merits, but on their artistic vision as well. In that regard, Alice excels. Using id Software's Quake III engine, Alice looked haunting and surrealistically beautiful in 2000. The HD re-release, which was bundled with copies of the long-awaited sequel Alice: Madness Returns, still looks very good. The higher resolution has given the otherworldly look of Wonderland and its vastly different areas a facelift, and the lighting is as spectacular as ever. One minor flaw in the HD presentation is the letterboxing cuts off the screen - and not in that way that old people think it does on movies. It legitimately obscures portions that were visible in the original PC release, which results in Alice and other characters being shown from the neck down.
The character models look blocky, of course, but that's to be expected with a game whose source material is 15 years old. Its the creepy interpretations of Carroll's classic characters that still shine through the hardware limitations of the era. The Mad Hatter, for instance, has a sickly green hue to his skin, a bulbous nose, and long, lanky legs just right for squashing things. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, on the other hand, are reimagined as grotesque, overweight thugs. It's all very dark and gloomy, but it fits the tale.
Several years after her original trip down the rabbit hole, Alice lies catatonic in a mental institution - the result of a traumatic event that claimed the lives of both of her parents. Wracked with survivor's guilt, Alice must once again enter Wonderland, overthrow the evil Red Queen, and restore peace in order to heal her own damaged psyche. Along the way, she'll encounter most of the most popular characters from the novels, including a more menacing-looking Cheshire Cat who helps guide her, the Caterpillar, and even Bill McGill, albeit briefly.
The game's soundtrack is suitably moody and wonderful. Composed by Nine Inch Nails member Chris Vrenna, the music is loaded with eerie elements - ticking clocks and chimes, harpsichords that sound like deranged music boxes, and ethereal voices. It's spine-tingling, the way it works in tandem with the game's equally outstanding visuals.
Where Alice falls flat on its face is in its gameplay.
Simply put, the controls are among the most finicky, imprecise, twitchy, and frankly god-awful I've ever experienced. In a game that is 90% jumping, you can see how that might be a problem. Overshooting jumps and falling to your death is common. Not only is it easy to miss a platform entirely, even if you land on it there's no guarantee you won't immediately fall right over the edge as the game attempts to incorporate momentum into your movement. Other times, you'd swear you jumped straight ahead, but the controls decided that you were just a hair off-center and you'll go flying on an angle, like an airball in a basketball game.
The jumping mechanics are fundamentally flawed, if not broken. For short jumps, you can aim using the camera controls and you'll see a silhouette of your feet. Pressing the jump button will make Alice jump to that precise spot. The trouble is that the feet icons don't always appear. It seems to be arbitrary, even when you're standing right next to the rock or ledge you want to jump to. The other problem is that this method certainly does you no good when you need to make a break for it, so you're forced to rely on constant saving and reloading for when you inevitably miss a jump and fall into lava/down a pit/onto spikes.
You cannot build a game so dependent on platform jumping and have such terrible controls. At the default setting, the camera spins wildly with the slightest flick of the analog stick or mouse. Movement is just as over-sensitive. The HD remaster seems to add some semblance of analog control, but it's still near impossible to move forward slowly and carefully, which the game often demands.
The controls are only half of the problem. Cheap enemies are constant. The novelty of fighting Card Guards quickly wears off in the later stages when they gain the ability to shoot explosive projectiles capable of hitting you across the whole screen, where none of you weapons can touch them. Then there are the Boojums, flying banshee-like ghouls whose scream not only damages Alice, but knocks her back. They frequently appear in sections where precise platforming is required, so expect to be knocked into a lot of pits. The final stages of the game are such a brutal assault of enemies, I found myself saving after taking out just one in a group.
Between the bad controls and the barrage of bad guys, Alice becomes a labor of sadistic love or possibly spite. Challenge is all well and good, but it should always be derived from intelligent AI enemies or brilliantly-designed levels that test a player's reflexes, not deaths caused by bad controls or being knocked off a cliff because an enemy swooped in out of nowhere.
At least the boss battles are cool. Most of them are, surprisingly, the easiest parts of the game. Alice has many cool weapons at her disposal, from her simple knife (called the Vorpal Blade), a deck of razor-sharp playing cards, explosive jack-in-the-boxes, dice that summon demons to fight for you, and jacks that home in on your enemies and chip away at their health. Even though most of the battles are little more that circle-strafing around enemies, picking up respawning health power-ups, and spamming the jacks, they're still exciting, tense sequences and, without exception, look great.
McGee's artistic ambition clearly reached further than his team could deliver from a gameplay perspective. As cool as the levels look, few of them are fun to play, even from the game's early stages. I estimate I spent just as much time staring at the Save/Load screen as I did actually playing the game.
And another thing: why does McGee feel the need to attach his name to every game he makes? Nintendo games don't carry a "Shigeru Miyamoto presents..." tagline, and that man made Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and StarFox (among others). American McGee made a bunch of Doom levels.
It's a shame that Alice has aged so poorly. For more than a decade, I looked back fondly on American McGee's darker take on some of my favorite pieces of literature ever, but now I'm not sure if it just hasn't aged well or if it was always this bad and I was just blinded by the pretty visuals.
American McGee's Alice was completed on a PlayStation 3 with no cheats.
The controls are only half of the problem. Cheap enemies are constant. The novelty of fighting Card Guards quickly wears off in the later stages when they gain the ability to shoot explosive projectiles capable of hitting you across the whole screen, where none of you weapons can touch them. Then there are the Boojums, flying banshee-like ghouls whose scream not only damages Alice, but knocks her back. They frequently appear in sections where precise platforming is required, so expect to be knocked into a lot of pits.
Posted by: motuandpatlugames | March 06, 2017 at 06:14 AM