Madness Returns is a platformer in the same
vein as Mario, Ratchet or Clank. You control Alice as she runs around Wonderland,
fighting creatures and other weird oddities with her Knight chess piece (which
she wields a hammer) and the Vorpal blade. You don’t really have to memorize
combos but enemies do need you to switch up your tactics once in a while. As
it’s so simplistic, combat can get a bit boring, obviously catering to the
button-mashing crowd. You’d expect a platformer to have bosses, don’t you?
Well, tough luck. There aren’t any save for the end game boss. It’s a bit of a
letdown to spend hours in an area, only to end it with a cutscene of you going
to the next.
Alice: Madness Returns is what the original
Super Mario Brothers on the NES was; a basic platformer with a stylized look.
You jump, you hit stuff, you flip switches to jump to a new area with more
stuff for you to hit. Rinse and repeat. While the game is decently long, the
majority of that is just padding. Once you’ve played one or two hours into the
game, guess what? That’s pretty much there is to it. You’ll be redoing (and
redoing) the same stuff over and over again in different areas.
Alice is broken up
into different chapters, with each taking a few hours. While that’s normally a
good thing, I started to get bored on the third world, when it dawned on me I
was doing the same things over and over again. I kept on playing in the hopes
that I’d find something different, but I never did.
There are hidden items you can find that
unlocks Alice’s memories, but even then the items aren’t that challenging to
find. The game’s pretty linear and just taking your time to slowly look around
means you’ll find most of them. Finding Alice’s memories does help flesh out
the flimsy story to a certain degree, but it never makes the experience any
more interesting. Even visually, the game’s weird looks gets stale after
awhile. Unlike Psychonauts (which was awesome), Madness Return’s weirdness
seems forced and uninspired. The Xbox may be lacking in the platformer
department but it sure deserves a better quality game than Alice. Don’t get me
wrong, Alice is a fun (if generic) platformer, but it’s on no way in the same
league as the Marios or Ratchets of the gaming world.
|
At a glance
Developer: Spicy
Horse
Publisher: Electronic
Arts
Genre: Action
Platform: Xbox 360
Players: 1
|
Verdict: 8.0
Playability: 6.0
Graphics: 7.0
Sound: 7.0
Addictiveness: 6.0
Value: 6.0 |
