Alice: Madness Returns

[seabizzit]

I just finished Alice: Madness Returns. Hmm, it wasn't too bad. Some aspects of the game were interesting, but the story was rather thin. Dialogue was really good, and the Cheshire cat is awesome as always. It's a shame he had the same role from the first game. I like him

Comments

[smoke]

BTW some of the platforming elements where pretty tedious like when you have to use the jack bomb to hold a switch and quickly go to another area before it blows up.... and things like that and sometimes with the parts where you are on a gear tea table with the giant white rabbit\mad hatter overlooking the battle and you can earn another rose I kept on dying over and over....

It's also kind of ironic how you say it's fairly short yet went on too long for your taste. ;) Some people today complain there are too many cutscenes in games. Like walk forward for two minutes, cut scene... walk forward for two minutes... cut scene... I personally thought there where just enough cuts scenes in alice madness returns but that's me. I thought the plot was fairly serviceable and the cut scenes where well done.

About the cheshire cat his role was the same yes and much of what he said was actually recycled from the first game and sometimes not even when it's the best fit for a particular scene.

In the end though I feel they did a really good job considering AAA titles aren't what they normally do... it was made by a completely different set of people than with the original and they usually make small casual titles for the chinese market. They said they are going back to it after they released this game. The only person who worked on the original who returned to work on this one was American McGee who was mostly a supervisor\producer.

[smoke]

BTW one last thing the American McGee was one of the guys who worked at id software originally on games like Doom and Quake.... the original Alice ran on the Quake 3 engine... so yeah the emphasis has always been to be more like Quake\Doom rather than some kind of adventure game\RPG. :) Although on the other hand I can see why a person would come at it thinking the plot and role playing aspects would be the focus thinking well "alice in wonderland is all about the story so it must be here too!"

[smoke]

BTW if you want to talk about games that have thin plots games like Borderlands are WAY More guilty of that than Alice Madness Returns.. the ending there didn't even have any sort of meaningful payoff in any kind of way... less so than even Alice. The plot in Borderlands was thread bare in favor of "not interrupting the player with cut scenes or dialog trees" and they purposely went after that as a goal. When they would have a cut scene it was ONLY to introduce a character and the camera would zoom up to them they would do a pose and it would say their name and they would recite a line and that's it. Compared to games like those Alice had an in depth plot! ;) Of course not to the level of a totally narrative based game like say.... Heavy Rain or a full fledged adventure game which it is not.

Seriously I sunk the dozens of hours it takes to complete borderlands into it and came away from it not really feeling like there was a plot whatsoever other than "OH noes there's a vault that is going to open soon you must rush to it and see what's up with it LOOT LOOT LOOT... DA TA DAA DAA YOU WIN and the vault is closed for another 2k years!"