Very poorly made game. Dull. Disappointing visually.

User Rating: 7 | Alice: Madness Returns PS3
Top to bottom Alice Madness Returns is a very poorly made game.

Alice suffers from every graphics issue under the sun. Pick any fancy pants technical term for graphics glitches and this game suffers from it. It would be a waste of time to list them all, but my favourite is the fact that Alice glides for a second every time prior the walking animation kicking in.

There isn't much substance to the game itself. It's a lot of platforming with awkward controls. Getting stuck on invisible lips in the ground and other wonderful glitches add some spice though. I have the platinum and I still don't understand how the inconsistent jumping mechanics are supposed to work. The camera is nauseating and randomly inverts your controls whenever it zooms out or in. The combat is frustrating and very basic. Your character freezes after using the fully charged teapot on some enemies. There are glitched trophies, both in the very good and very bad kind of ways. The lack of boss fights is strange. Overall the game just screams of a lack of effort.

The main draw of this game for me, and I'm sure for others as well, is that the game is supposed to be twisted and interesting visually. All of the terrible gameplay would be slightly forgivable if it hit that mark... but the biggest problem with Alice is that is fails to be interesting.

There are certainly a few memorable moments but the majority of this game feels dull. You spend so much time platforming through big, empty, lifeless environments that the game looses any sense of atmosphere. If you're lucky and the textures kick in fast enough to actually see the environment, there may be the occasional point of interest. But overall the muted colors, lack of detail and boat loads of repetition drown out any good. The mysterious absence of any real music certainly doesn't help. You would think a dark Alice in Wonderland would write and design itself.

I found some of the lines of the stylized dialogue viewed in isolation as enjoyable, but overall there's really no story here. It is nonsensical, but not nonsensical in the good way... if that makes any sense. Rather than being twisted... it just comes off as poorly written.

I was actually going to score this a little higher but the maddening final boss fight was so frustrating it soured me on the game even more. As the only legitimately challenging combat situation in the game it revealed how absolutely atrocious and terribly inconsistent the game play really is. While this game isn't so bad that it's unplayable, Alice Madness Returns is just a long, dull, weak game that fails to be relevant or interesting visually.