Alice: Madness Returns review

Regularly promoted alongside Shadows Of The Damned, there are few finer stablemates for Suda’s descent into hell than American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns. Both herald from digital auteurs encroaching on familiar territory – hell and Lewis Carroll – and both lack ideas to match their visual invention. This is a Burton-esque Wonderland; in fact, it’s more Burton-esque than the director’s own attempt. The Unreal engine lives up to its name: not since Mario Galaxy has a game pumped out such a babble of visual styles. If the spirit of Carroll exists at all in Madness Returns, it is in the constant hunger for the next oddity.

But this is normalcy reskinned as nonsense. Platforming repeats the same networks of floating squares and upward gusts from level to level, hoping to disguise this by changing what is jumped on. A floating platform is a floating platform whether it’s a mah-jong tile, playing card or iceberg. And so it is with so much of Madness Returns: mushrooms, pig snouts and potions repurposed as springs, switches and unlockable concept art. One thudding inevitability after the next.

There is bite to the combat, however. With a familiar lock-on camera and an emphasis on matching weapons to abomination, it feels a lot like Zelda. Link can’t dematerialise into butterflies like Alice, but he would surely appreciate the need to peel enemies down to their fleshy cores with the right combination of pepper-grinder guns and hobby-horse thwacks. Finally, the feel catches up with the look: scalding tea barrages thump through shields (with a delightful glass shattering sound) as the Vorpal Sword stings with a true snicker-snack. Enemy designers keep new forms (and attack strategies) coming, mixing various breeds to concoct fresh battle rhythms.

Only in combat does Alice truly find her footing. Unlike Garcia Hotspur’s bellowing rampage through perdition, Alice is an unsure presence. Her mind is faltering, cutting from Victorian London – largely non-interactive film sets – to Wonderland. It has the air of a narrative device, but to what end? If there are parallels to be drawn – does Wonderland reflect real-world predicaments? – they are hard to see. McGee’s fiction is Cheshire Cat cryptic, decipherable only by those well versed in his universe. To others, the story unfolds as a series of fetch missions given by ugly versions of iconic fantasy figures.

The game’s visual and combative energy spark the urge to see where it goes next. If only there was something to do when you get there. [5]

Xbox 360 version tested.