American McGee's Alice Review

The story underlining the game is well in place, and the bizarre and irrational world of the new Goth Alice actually helps to explain and strengthen Rogue's decision to go for a fast pace 3D platformer action, rather than an cinematic/narrative 3D action adventure. What's more, the game oozes with loads of unique style in terms of attitude and razor-sharp adult nature of some of the sarcastic comments and sporadic conversation. Touches of peculiar and sarcastic dialogue don't make up a large portion of the game, but they do an excellent job of setting the overall tone. So, even though it's very much focused on pace and pure gameplay elements, like platform puzzles and shooting action, American McGee's Alice offers a touch of satire and some witty dialogues, which give meaning and depth to the project. Much like the book, the game carries a meaningful message for the ones willing to "listen," and it's not nearly as one-dimensional as one might expect by reading the PR material. Also, the musical score and outstanding voice acting really help convey the principal idea and the atmosphere. (Yeah, that ex-NIN drummer did a helluva job.) Alice characters sound and feel alive, which is largely due to the excellent dramatization of the characters. Achieving this must've been a delicate task for the design team, as the narrative scenes needed to be short, but highly effective to keep the storyline compelling, despite the fast-gameplay-oriented nature of the game.

From a pure technical point of view, Rogue Entertainment has done an exceptional job in keeping the gameplay dynamics high throughout the game with challenging AI routines, meticulously designed platform and action puzzles, and versatile and interesting weapons. The incredibly complex and varying map design and the layout of key objects also help a great deal in keeping the gameplay flowing.

Unfortunately, this fast gameplay comes at the expense of exploration and logical puzzle aspects of adventure games, which are reduced to a bare minimum in Alice. Because it's an action platformer, the game is highly linear and doesn't really offer any kind of freedom in terms of what you have to do and where you have to go. Not to mention the fact that the Cheshire Cat is acting as your guide giving helpful hints and pointers along the way if you encounter even the easiest of "puzzles." All right, this keeps the pace going, but it wouldn't hurt if we had to use our brain a bit more, and kinda had the freedom to choose our path, and even make different ethical choices. I guess all this got scrapped when a guy from EA came around the Rogue's offices and casually mentioned: "the company thinks that Alice should appeal to a wider audience, and you guys should follow certain time deadlines." Don't get me wrong, Alice offers long hours of gameplay; there are plenty of different puzzles, and you'll even run into a few challenging ones, but it's more than obvious that the exploration and non-linearity factors had to be sacrificed to keep some kind of sensible project deadline.

Finally, the Eye-candy.

No doubt you've read all about this in some review on the net already, and you're probably aware that this is one of THE prettiest games around, so I really won't bore you too much with the details. Yeah, it's freaking beautiful: the animations, the rich models, colorful settings, exceptional physics, and smooth frame rates. If we take Rune as a glowing example of what can be done with the Unreal engine, than Alice definitely becomes a reference of what can be achieved when Quake III code gets manhandled the right way. What really impressed me about Alice's visuals is the imaginativeness of the designers, and the highly thematic environments, which completely differ from one level to another and are brought to life with some crisp and detailed textures (just check out the water textures and you'll see why T&L is the HOT 3D technology of the moment). Rogue Entertainment has stretched the limits of the Quake III engine technology, making Alice by far the best modification of the Quake 3 code to date.

Hey, and I though American McGee didn't know how to design games! What better way to shut me up than to deliver a game like Alice -- truly a high quality project. And that's regardless of what someone might think of American's design style, or the way that he has taken the genre.