Summary: 45/100

"American McGee's Alice" is a Quake III shoot-em-up where your job is to murder almost every living creature in the world. The game itself is a retread of the cliches in this genre. The production values are superb, and the strength of the art and the sound raises the final score from a D to a C+.

Review

"American McGee's Alice" is a third-person shooter. That means that although the player controls the actions of our heroine, Alice (from the Wonderland stories), she is usually seen from slightly above and behind.

The game begins with a pre-rendered animated sequence that sets up an intriguing premise. One night after reading the Wonderland books, the real Alice woke up to find her house is on fire. She escaped and survived, but the rest of her family perished. Wracked with guilt,
Alice withdrew from the world and now lies comatose in an insane asylum. At some point her mind goes back to Wonderland, which is now dark and menacing. The metaphor is clear: Wonderland is her own mind, warped and damaged. To save herself she must save Wonderland by destroying the evil forces that have poisoned it.

Sadly, that rich beginning is virtually irrelevant to the game itself. The technology of this game is based on the Quake III rendering engine, and it appears that the rest of the game elements have followed as well. In short: you run through various levels and shoot everything that moves. Along the way, you also solve some puzzles. One improvement on Quake is that in Alice there are other characters, but they exist only in the cut-scenes - little pre-scripted sequences where you take your hand off the controls and watch. In the cut-scenes the other characters usually ask you for help (or occasionally offer it), but the solution to their problems usually involves running around and killing everything that moves.

The story problem with Alice is similar to that of many of its predecessors, going all the way back to Myst: designers have confused backstory with story. The backstory sets up the situation, and gets us acclimated to a world, its characters, the hero, and the hero's goal (which all too often is essentially to escape the world). But once the game begins the backstory is made essentially irrelevant, since you simply walk throught the environments, killing everything you encounter.

There are cliches in this genre, and Alice shares many of them: mazes that go on and on, random items you need to collect (for example, to make a necessary weapon), giant clockworks you must navigate your way through with carefully-timed jumps, and weapons that are just sitting there in odd places for you to pick up. This is another of of the many places where attention to the story could have paid off. The weapons themselves have no explanation, and they are just randomly scattered in the environment. But who made them? How do they work? Why have they just been left lying around? Who abandoned them? Why? Of course the game designers put the weapons and power-ups where you'd be sure to find them, but aside from a nice name and icon they are essentially random things that you use to kill everything that moves. The game doesn't even hint at justifying the weapons and their placement (or those of the puzzles, discussed below); it just accepts the conventions of the form without question and proceeds to use them.

There are several puzzles in this game. Sadly, they also lack any kind of integration into the game. Although they use the same imagery as the world in which they're placed, they are basically random ways of hiding information. I don't want to spoil the game for potential players by giving any specific examples, but I found that the puzzles felt bolted-on to the rest of the game. They felt introduced solely to extend the playing time.

There are some good design decisions in the levels. Most of the time, the way forward is clear: there is only one way to leave the scene without retracing your steps. I like this, as it minimizes the number of dead ends and wrong choices that one could make. There is a minimum of forcing you to trudge down the same path over and over, though it does happen a few times. To stage your progress through the levels, the game uses a minor variation on the locked-door idea. Rather than collecting a key for a locked door, you often search for a big handle set into the ground: pulling that handle opens the door or triggers some other action. These handles, like the weapons, have no rhyme or reason to them, and no explanation for their existence or placement: they just exist for the sole purpose of gameplay.

One could argue that the random and unexplained nature of the weapons, enemies, handles, and other gameplay elements is part of the Wonderland mystery. But it's too easy to just wave away bad design as "mysterious"; it's unsatisfying and ultimately reveals that these issues simply didn't receive much thought. Besides, the rest of the game's design belies such "mystery" in this world: the graphics and architecture represent a great deal of unified design with recurring themes and consistent use.

There are a few unpleasant interface problems in the game. For example, when swimming underwater, it's important not to run out of air. But the game doesn't have any visual indication of how much air Alice currently has, so you can't tell how much time you have left to explore, and when you need to resurface. Another example has to do with jumping. When jumping, you can usually get a visual display of where you will land, which is very nice. However, during some parts of the game, this display is unavailable or doesn't work correctly, so you have to make some tricky jumps without really knowing where you'll land. I found I had to save the game after each jump, and then try several times to make the next one. Once successful, I'd save again, and repeat the process until I'd reached the goal. There's no inventory system. Although there aren't a great many object to carry around in Alice, there are a few, and there's no way to tell what you have and what you don't. You can only figure this out implicitly - if you're in the place where you remember an object used to be, and it's gone, then you must have it. If you don't remember where it was, or can't get back there to check, you're out of luck.

Although Alice's gameplay is impoverished cliche, the production values are great. The art, and art direction, in this game is certainly at the top of the field. The characters (both good and bad) are visually interesting and generally move well. The AI that controls how the bad guys move and attack is also good, in the sense that it presents a challenge and the bad guys move in reasonable ways that you can predict and plan for. The voice acting ranges from good to very good; an exception is the Cheshire Cat's darkly sinister voice, which is superb. The sound and music are both excellent, and mesh beautifully with the visuals.

If the game itself had received the same level of care that the art and sound did, the result could have been amazing. Unfortunately, we instead have a succession of effectively random environments in which your goal is monotonously consistent murder. The weapons and puzzles are contrived and don't fit into the world. The story is irrelevant, and the the other characters are merely window dressing as you cut a path of blood through Wonderland.

The pleasure of this game is in the art and music. There are a number of big battles with dangerous creatures ("bosses" in games jargon). You can spend a lot of time figuring out which of your weapons is able to hurt the creature, and then even more time working out fighting strategies. You need to defeat these bosses to proceed with the game, so if you're not prepared to spend an hour or more killing a single creature, the game is effectively over for you at that point.

Happily, it turns out that Quake provides easy-access cheat codes to give yourself unlimited life and ammunition when you want it - these codes are listed all over the Internet, and even appear in an appendix in the official the hint book. I found that the most satisfying way to play was to start the game in "Easy" mode, and play through as a regular character, saving frequently with the quick-save option. When I got into big fights I'd try my best to survive and win. When that failed, I'd return to my saved game and make myself all-powerful. It was easy then to kill the baddies. Then I'd return to normal mode and proceed with the game,

Summary

"American McGee's Alice" is a triumph of art and sound for the current level of technology. The game begins with a captivating initial idea. But the game itself is cliched and inconsistently woven together. The sad truth is that this game is basically no different than any other Quake imitator - the production values are wonderful, but there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to develop or transcend the genre. Because the gameplay is so predictable, monotonous and cliched, I would give this game a D. But the art and music are so good, I'll bump that to a C+ for the final score.

Recommendation: Set this to "easy", get the hint book to help you with the mazes and obscure puzzles, and simply play through the game to enjoy the art and music. Use the standard Quake cheat codes for the big battles.