Leger vs. Alice: Madness Returns (Playstation 3)

Never mind Alice not being able to walk up the last step of a staircase onto a platform. She just seem stuck there until I command her to jump. Then she jumps.

Alice: Madness Returns got some serious issues with getting the environments to feel like more than a dead scenery even though things are moving, rotating and transforming all over the place. You see, an opening which Alice clearly can walk into is never an opening unless the game wants it to be.

Getting stuck on a staircase is really not that strange in the context of previously not having been able to stand on a platform which looked standable or not managed to walk through an opening which clearly had nothing blocking the way through.

Also, after the first hour of doing some jumping, turning small over and over again to go through tiny keyholes, walking on some invisible platforms made visible and beating up some monsters at places clearly signaling that a battle is about to commence this very loop is repeated over and over again.

With more and more frustrating jumps to make, keyholes getting harder to find, invisible platforms moving faster getting more difficult to reach aswell as battles with enemies that gets increasingly tougher dealing more damage and acting more defensive.

Best of all is the introduction of the exploding bunny Alice can play around with, a bunnt which besides blowing up stuff also acts as a heavy thing to put on trigger plates. Only problem is that after a set amount of seconds it explodes, making the trigger go back to its unpressed state.

Triggers often make a shootable clock turn up (which when shot opens up the way forward), almost always placed somewhere hard to reach. A couple of pits, platforms and enemies away, naturally hard to deal with, and with time passing by while the camera pans over to the clock so that one can not see what the fuck Alice is doing; If not using the precious time when Alice is out of the picture to move her towards the clock it is not uncommon to see time run out having to restart the process.

Such fun, in the blind jumping between platforms above pits of death.

More or less hidden along the way through the fucked up Wonderland of Alice are memories and other collectibles. Due to the linear nature of the game it is quite hard to miss out on the secrets if you actually bother to look for them, and since they offer little of worth to any but completionists its easy to decide to not care about them.

It all feels like an early Playstation 2 game having initially been planned to be released during the previous generation of hardware, designwise, where the argument to care is the presentation.

And by presentation I do not mean the unstable framerate, the sometimes muddy textures or the sudden shoot 'em up sequences (which are embarassingly bad) but the fantastic aesthetics.

The game presents some beautiful environments, sometimes dark and steampunky and sometimes bright and lsd trippingly colourful. Wonderland is a curious place to explore and had it not been for the stages overstaying their welcome (they just never want to end, no matter if they have nothing more to say) I would recommend playing the game just to get to see some of the places Alice traverses.

Juxtaposing Wonderland is a brown and dark city where Alice actually lives when not stuck in her mind trying to make sense of her familys demise in the fire the previous game dealt with. Driven by guilt aswell as a feeling of things not really having happened the way they seem she gets "professional" help to supress her horrifying memories, but a side effect is a Wonderland falling to pieces.

Gritty and grim, but not to an extent of pure horror even though decapitations, bloodlettings and pressure relieving drillings into the brain get thrown in ones way. Partly less horrifying thanks to the cartoony cutscenes and comical undetones throughout it all.

But, no.

It does not work.

Halfway through the game with closer to 40% showing on my save file I just could not motivate myself to keep playing, even having reduced the difficulty to Easy to spend less time in the boring battles.

Switching between the knife and a sledgehammer like horsehead on a stick (or whatever it is, can not remember), shooting projectiles to keep the distance from the enemies, the battles seem to drag on. Even if the weapons gets upgrades, if the butterfly themed evasion is effectively used or if Alice goes into a rage when almost getting killed.

You can find a flow in the battles, you can learn to kill enemies quicker, but the repetetiveness of it all (as a part of the main repetetive gameplay loop) makes it all feel like a chore more than entertainment.

Not having played the prequel I just had to see what was on offer, it just happened to be included as a free DLC, and after some hours of playing the two decades old American McGee's Alice it became obvious that something managed to get lost along the way to the sequel.

No matter the uglier graphics, questionable controls and lack of double jump the first game in the series just felt as a much more inspired product with every new place visited introducing some new kind of concept making it intriguing to see what comes next.

Alice: Madness Returns is in no way a disaster, but at least it should have taken the series in a progressive direction instead of sticking with the generics of the genre leaving the innovation of the prequel a distant memory to be supressed while trying to get Alice unstuck from the starcase.