The art style and music makes you love it, but the gameplay does not.

User Rating: 7 | Alice: Madness Returns PC
I had very high expectations for this game, because of the direction of the art style, that is seen so rarely in the recent games. After a few hours of playing, as my eyes adapted to the incredible eye candy right before my eyes, I realised, that that's pretty much everything what this game was.

Graphics: 9/10
As previously mentioned (over and over and over again), this game is beautiful. The art style is varied it changes twice in each level. From technical point of view, it's nothing special. From the artistic point of view, it's awesome only in vast and huge places, but some of the more claustrophobic environments aren't as impressive. But anyway - some places are so beautiful that they made my eyes bleed.

Sound: 7,5/10
The eye candy on the screen wouldn't be as good if there wasn't the music. The main theme along with some other pieces of music is great. The sound design has one major flaw that sometimes can be an eargasm. That's the almost constant ambient sound in the background. In certain places it suits perfectly, but most of the time it's just a substitute for the lack of music. The other flaw is the inconsistent voice acting. Sometimes it sounds just fine, but sometimes it makes the characters feel as if they were dolls and nothing else.

Gameplay: 6/10
At first, it seems nothing special - platforming, combat, puzzle, etc. But in time I noticed, that nothing was changing. It didn't get more challenging as the game progressed. I probably wouldn't notice it, if the game wasn't so long.
There are many invisible walls and cheap deaths (mostly because of them), but the thing that disappointed me the most was how slow the game was to introduce new things. There was a new puzzle (mostly, a boring one) in about every 6 hours. In between I was just jumping and slashing my way through the game. At least the weapons were varied and interesting and that made the combat so much fun. The other fun factor was the seeking for secrets to gain extras.

Presentation: 6,5/10
The story is mostly impossible to follow if you haven't played the first game or read through all the extras unlocked (that's what I did), but when you dig into it, it's very interesting.

Replay value: 6/10
If you get obsessed, you can always go back to collect all the hidden rewards, or look at the beautiful surroundings, but other than that, there's not that much to come back for.