Alice: Madness Returns | SuperPod Game Club

Another short one for the SuperPod Game Club. In honor of spooky October, we were tasked with playing through Alice: Madness Returns. This one was chosen by Matt, who completed the previous game first. Most of us were very distracted this month, so only Tony was able to beat this month's game.

Let's take a look!

This year for Halloween we were tasked to play a spooky game and apparently I was the only one brave enough to answer the call. I’ll be honest upfront, I had to blaze through this one rather quickly due to time constraints and was banking on others to help pad things out. Anyway, here is my very brief review of American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns.

The direct follow up to the 2000 cult classic American McGee’s Alice, Alice: Madness Returns takes place after the events of the first game. Some time after suffering the traumatic loss of her family and narrowly escaping Wonderland, Alice Liddell now resides at a children's orphanage where she is under the care of Dr. Agnus Bumby, but before she knows it she is thrown back into a now corrupted Wonderland to face the painful truth of her past.

The Good:

The twisted recreations of Wonderland and its inhabitants are all great. All of the new environments Alice visits during her journey are visually pleasing, creative and filled with details that really help make the world feel alive. The voice acting is also really well done, with some of the original voice actors returning to reprise their roles, most notably Susie Brann as Alice and Roger Jacksons as the Cheshire Cat.

The Not So Good:

The combat can get somewhat repetitive and tiresome, a lot of the time you will be fighting the same enemies in what are essentially combat rooms. Aside from a few mini-boss encounters, there are no major boss fights until the final fight at the end of the game, which was rather disappointing since it always felt like a level was building up to a big battle that never materialized.

Overall:

Alice: Madness Returns is far from being a bad game and much like the original, it seems to have a rather strong fan following. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have the time to replay the first game before jumping into the sequel, or because I’m simply not that big of a fan of Alice in Wonderland, but I found the end product to be rather lacking. While the visuals and world design are top notch, the combat leaves more to be desired and the story felt rushed. With that being said, the game is often on sale and even includes the first game on XBOX (and technically PC/Steam with a little effort), so I’d say it still might be worth checking out for a few bucks.