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» NINTENDO 64 » HARDWARE » PS2 » PSOne » XBOX » GAMECUBE » HANDHELDS » SEGA
Adam (Dead Regime) Ingle December 14, 2000 Review Feedback

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..

Game Title Stats

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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