Just finished
Alice: Return to Madness. What a great game! A very worthy successor to American McGee Alice, which was already a good game, even if the controls were a little bit awkward sometimes.
Here Alice benefits from the Unreal Engine... and it's damn beautiful! Well, beautiful might not apply to some landscapes Alice is evolving in, but still this game has a real artistic direction. Beware, the main point is madness, and madness is not pretty, so I guess it means this game is only for grown-ups... and it's perfect like that!
Alice... is a platformer, but you will also have to fight, with 4 different weapons you'll gather through the game. Some foes have special weaknesses to some weapons, so observe them well and choose the right weapon! You can also upgrade your weapons with the teeth (!!) you'll be gathering from monsters and destructible things.
But Alice is also a game full of secrets. At the beginning of the game, Alice drinks a potion that makes her able to shrink at will. And when she shrinks, she can see things she can't when she's "normal": clues, hidden passages, bonuses...
This is the key to the game, because you will mostly evolve in Alice's tortured mind and dreams. So you will gather memories from the different people she knows and try to discover what really happened during the fire that costed the lives of all her family...
Lots of witty dialogues, gripping moments and an awesome final boss fight!!
So... it's a perfect game? No, of course. Don't try to play it without a gamepad, it's just hell. Then, the cameras are sometimes placed in awkward positions, which sometimes makes the action a little messy... But with the stick controlling the camera, you generally can solve the problem quickly. The target locking system is interesting, but needs some practice to be fully mastered.
But those little problems don't prevent Alice... to be a great game! With a good replay value, since on my first run I spent around 17hs playing and I only did around 80% of the game, I think. There are still lots of secrets to discover, bonuses to unlock and to finish the game the first time unlocks the "new game +" mode, with other costumes and bonuses.
I'm really glad to have picked up this game during a Steam sale, it will definitely stay in my gaming library as one of the best games I've ever played!
My full list for 2012 so far:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/games_finished_in_2012_1/post15
