Alice: Madness Returns
Dropped by chapter 3. It's too repetitive. Compared to the original game it's much better. No more slow animations, puzzles that force you to guess or slow weapons. Despite the improvements it has contradictory mechanics. You shrink to pass through small openings and the same mechanic is reused to see invisible platforms. But you cannot jump while shrunken. That's nonsense!
The art is beautiful and rivals Bioshock, but the gameplay is pretty boring with repetition of the same challenges over and over. There are some minigames but they don't add much to the final game. If you compare it to other 3D platforming games such as Rayman 2, Alice Madness Returns is worse and we are comparing to a game that came a decade before.
I took notes on many aspects of the design in this game:
- Menacing Ruin. The game does tell you that you have to use the umbrella to send his fireball attacks back to him. However, the game left me clueless that I had to use the Focus mode. I had to find out by trial and error that to defeat that boss you have to use the pepper grinder to destroy his masks. The same thing with the Drowned Sailor, it took me many trials and errors to understand how to defeat it.
- The level design is better at showing you the path to follow. However, it still fails sometimes, leaving the switch to be activated outside the player's view.
- It suffers from the same repetition seen in other games. Too many hits to take down enemies. Too much repetition of the same enemies.
- The same steam jets are used over and over through out the whole game. They didn't break up this repetition with something else.
- The challenges to earn upgrades are more exhausting than challenging.
It's a pity that this game had an interesting take on Alice in the Wonderland, a tale that is world wide famous, but it fails miserably to deliver a challenging game. The story is good, the cutscenes have excellent 2D paper style art, but the gameplay lacks so much depth and isn't engaging.
