Follow the Starving, Grotesque White Rabbit...
Pros:
The game that everyone's secretly been waiting for, complete w/ sound and graphics to match.
Cons:
CPU Cycle Killer. Upgrade your hardware or don't bother.
The Bottom Line:
This is the most twisted concept to ever hit the harddrive. A must-have for anyone with a slightly demented sense of humor as well as a slightly itchy trigger finger.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
A fire. Pages turning and burning. The Mad Hatter yelling at Alice, telling her to get out of the house. A young girl jumps out of the burning building, passes out on the snow, and wakes up in what appears to be a bed at a mental institution. A nurse puts the white rabbit on her bet. An all-too-familiar voice calling her back into Wonderland. A dark, gothic landscape the likes of which could only spew forth from the head of a Quake level designer. And so it begins, the darkest chapter in the story of Alice's adventures. Your goal? Kill the queen. Your weapons? Plenty. Your mission? Impossible. But hey, getting there is half the fun.
Welcome to Wonderland...
As Alice enters the game, it's obvious that Wonderland is no longer the euphoric world it once was. Everything is dark and twisted, from the Skool and the funhouse, both full of the Insane Children, to the chessboard levels, to the beautiful underwater sequences, the level design is amazing, and the graphics are some of the best I've seen. The gameplay is, more or less, in the style of Tomb Raider. 3rd person perspective, jump across ledges, swim, kill, and so on, but the Quake 3 engine makes the level design work. Although some levels you'll need to repeat over and over and over again in order to move on, you'll occasionally find yourself exploring each level and marveling in the detail.
The eerie feeling that you get while playing adds to the experience, from the diseased look of the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, to having to fight the Mad Hatter as well as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. The various enemies all have different methods of defeat, from the screaming phantoms to the Card Guards outside the Queens' palace.
Your Arsenal
My favorite part of AM's Alice would have to be the weapon selection. You think it's hard to imagine Alice going from a kind young girl to a vengeful young woman brandishing a butcher knife? It all goes downhill from there, with Jack-In-the-Box-Bombs to razor-sharp playing cards, to the Demon Dice (lord only knows what can happen when you roll three 6's). The combat in this game is remarkably challenging at times, although sometimes it seems that you're just slaying wave after wave of baddies.
Intangibles...
First off, something must be said for the eerie, industrial-type soundtrack provided by Trent Reznor of NIN. This music is perfect for the game, and heightens the atmosphere to levels even the superior graphics couldn't reach on it's own. The ability to save wherever you please in the game is a great help, unlike other *cough*Max Payne*cough* games. The only problem I have with this game is the load time. If your PC isn't a cut above the minimum requirements to begin with, you're gonna have plenty of time waiting for each level to load. Although I haven't had the time to give the game a spin since I added 64 more megs of RAM, I can only hope that my performance will speed up somewhat.
A bit of an afterthought
As mentioned in Wired, as well as other industry magazines, I'm sure (well, I only saw Wired, so I could be wrong), American McGee is planning on giving the Alice treatment to another classic we all know and love: The Wizard of Oz. I speak for every gamer out there when I say not only may whoever our God(s) of choice may be have mercy on whatever souls we choose to believe or not believe we have, but that I'd sell my aforementioned soul for the chance to test out the beta.
