American
McGee's Alice
Alice uses an enhanced Quake 3 engine to bring the surrealistic
nightmare called Wonderland to life. This makes for
some very impressive worlds, with highly detailed textures
and excellent fog, weapons, and environmental effects.
Of course, the graphics do come at a price. To get all
the bells and whistles you need to have a hefty machine.
The scalability of the Quake 3 engine allows for a variety
of systems, but you won’t get the full effect of all
the visuals without the power. If you’ve got the machine,
Alice will treat you to some excellent graphics, making
Wonderland that much more twisted - and that’s a good
thing.
Another thing the developers paid a great deal of attention
to is the audio. Both score and effects are amazing.
Sound effects are extremely high quality with hissing
steam, screaming banshees, grinding gears and more.
To fuse it all together is a simply awesome original
score. Composed by Nine Inch Nails founding member Chris
Vreena, the score mixes the madness of Wonderland with
an industrial feel, combined with the haunting sounds
of antique toys, unidentifiable samples, and chanting
for a beautiful and eerie experience. It’s both completely
unique and yet somewhat similar to some of NIN’s earlier
works. The music stays in the background, is never overbearing,
but it’s always there, just adding that much more depth
to the strange and bizarre Wonderland. To top it all
off is some exceptional voice acting. The voices for
Alice and the Cheshire Cat are the best of the group.
Alice has that childish quality, but with undertones
of being very serious, and very deadly. The Cheshire
Cat is given a deep, somewhat scratchy British voice
which utters the cat’s cryptic wisdom extremely. In
all my searching I was never able to find out which
voice actors played which parts, but I’d definitely
like to commend Susie Brann, Roger Jackson, Jarion Monroe,
Andrew Chaikin and Anni Long for some wonderful work.
First and foremost in Alice is the environment. The
development team has made every attempt possible to
make Wonderland both strangely familiar to those who
know the original story, yet quite different in a frightening
madness. Even a simple black and white world of chess
pieces is twisted with a checkerboard sky, the only
contrasting color being the evil Red pieces who are
out to slay all the White pieces. What could easily
be someone’s back yard has been transformed into an
evil rendition of Honey I Shrunk The Kids with flying
insects trying to drop acorn bombs and Army Ants shooting
at you with bayoneted rifles. There’s a mechanical world
where the Mad Hatter has truly gone mad and turns insane
children into killer robots, where simple clockworks
can become a challenging maze of moving parts. The game’s
atmosphere is simply amazing. I’ve run out of adjectives
to express how impressed I am with how the team brought
this world to life. Something worth noting is a small
booklet that comes with the game that is written from
the perspective of the doctor who is trying to treat
Alice while she is busy trying to save herself. Things
that happen to her in her real life seem juxtaposed
with what you find in the game. The journal has no bearing
on the game, but it’s little touches like this that
enhance the experience even more.
I waited until the end to explain the only real downfall
of the game. It’s the AI: it seems as if the creators
were so busy creating a world, they didn’t give enough
attention to what makes the enemies in the world challenging.
Most of the challenge in a fight comes from the attacks
the enemies are capable of, and not from their intelligence.
In fact, they show a very disappointing lack of intelligence.
Card Guards at times seem eager to charge you and then
turn right around and flee. On occasion an enemy may
just stand there and let you kill him, sometimes not
even fighting back. Another problem is the path-finding
ability of the enemies. If you pop around a corner,
the enemy almost always gets caught on the edge. In
most cases the enemy instantly changes course, but it
would have been better to avoid this altogether. In
one section you have to get a kid to follow you to help
you open a gate, and I constantly had to backtrack to
get the kid unstuck from a corner. This is unfortunately
a serious stumble for gamers who play a game strictly
for the challenge of its action sequences. It really
disappoints me that such a serious flaw is present in
such a wonderful game.
I love this game. I’ve had dreams since playing this
game of the worlds I visited in Alice. Playing Alice
is like playing in the mind of a lunatic and a genius:
I wonder American McGee is like? If you have any appreciation
for surrealism, creative thinking, fantasy, or the twisted
or unusual, Alice is a game you should devour in large,
delirious doses. The worlds are incomparably deeper
and more original than any other game I’ve ever played;
however, if you’re looking for an action game where
the challenge comes from enemy tactics and not from
the world itself, just stay home - or better yet, give
Alice a try. Alice is much like an independent film.
I don’t know how it will do with the gaming mainstream,
but just because it’s not targeted towards the happy
majority, doesn’t mean it’s not a game of the highest
quality. I will keep Alice for as long as my feeble
mind can handle it..
|
Genre:
Action/Adventure
Release
Date:
Available
Publisher:
Electronic Arts
Developer:
Rogue Entertainment
ESRB:
Mature
System
Requirements :
PIII 400
64 MB RAM
3D Card w/ 16MB / 32MB rec
DX 8 sound
8x CD-ROM min
580 MB HDD |
Concept
THE most original game I have played in years. |
100
|
Gameplay
Compelling story, nice puzzles, quite a challenge.
|
95
|
Graphics
The Quake3 Engine was an excellent choice for
the game. |
95
|
Sound
Effects, voices, music…all superb.
|
100
|
Technical
Stable, resource taxing at higher resolutions,
tragically dumb AI. |
85
|
Overall
A
very brave game that won’t be accepted by everyone,
but I love it anyways. |
95
|
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