Alice Madness Returns Xbox One Review

Buy Alice: Madness Returns by Electronic Arts for Xbox 360 at GameStop. Find release dates, customer reviews, previews, and more. Check out CCC's in-depth Alice: Madness Returns review for the Xbox 360 to find out if this game is worth buying, renting, or if you should avoid it altogether.

Unreal Engine 3 continues to dominate the current development landscape; the popular middleware gained more momentum recently with the news that LucasArts has signed a studio-wide deal that will see all its upcoming titles developed on the ubiquitous Epic platform. In the meantime, the developer itself plans to roll out its most technically advanced UE3 title yet, Gears of War 3, destined for big things when it is released later this year. Despite the emergence of competitors such as CryEngine 3, Epic's position in the engine-licensing market only seems to be moving from strength to strength - a ringing endorsement of its technology, with Alice: Madness Returns the latest in a long line of titles to benefit from its cross-platform credentials.

Historically, Unreal Engine 3 games have tended to favour the Xbox 360, to the point where Epic's own Bulletstorm featured a smoother performance level and graphical effects absent from the PlayStation 3 version of the game. Alice: Madness Returns is an interesting example of how other third-party developers are handling the engine: there are clear examples of graphical advantages on each console platform, and while the overall impression is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are very close indeed, there are some notable differences, as the head-to-head movie and the Alice: Madness Returns comparison gallery demonstrate.

The first thing that you'll notice is that Alice is a cleaner-looking game on the PS3, with smoother edges and less in the way of subtle aliasing. The jaggies aren't exactly an issue on either version due to the style of the artwork and the colour choices employed, which tend to hide many of the edge artifacts. Both versions of the game render out in 720p and there's no anti-aliasing on the Xbox 360 version, while PS3 owners get the added benefit of a post-process-based AA solution, most likely MLAA. As there is no texture blur in Spicy Horse's implementation, edges and textures are left looking nice and sharp, thus enhancing overall image quality.

Despite the additional memory savings from using MLAA over a more traditional anti-aliasing solution, there are a few examples of missing or pared-back texture details on the PS3 - for example, the lack of grass occupying some of the ground textures. There's also a reduction in specular highlighting (the shininess of a surface) on some effects in a few scenes, such as the lack of sheen on the splashes of the shrinking potion flowing from the fountain near the beginning of the game.

The overall visual experience isn't exactly compromised, considering that most of the game appears like-for-like in most other areas, but there are times when specific locations appear slightly more barren due to the changes that have been made.

On the flipside, we see that LODs appear to be a touch more refined on the Sony platform with shadows and a few occasional textures loading up a little earlier, no doubt taking advantage of the mammoth mandatory HDD install leading to faster asset streaming.

Other than that, there are a few other graphical oddities that crop up from time to time. Some alpha-based effects appear to suffer from texture compression issues on all three formats at various points, while some of the shadows cast on Alice can look a little rough when they flicker and glitch in and out of view when moving through the environment, something which occurs more often on the PS3 version of the game.

Performance analysis reveals that Alice: Madness Returns is v-synced on both platforms and features a capped 30FPS update, but there is a distinct difference in how both versions operate across the basic run of play. Initially, neither one really deviates from the targeted 30FPS update. We see one or two frames being torn on the 360, and a little more on the PS3, but nothing particularly noticeable at all. During much of our time spent exploring some of the game's imaginatively constructed environments, most of the slight dips in smoothness had very little impact on the overall experience on either platform - both were equally playable. It's only when we move into more detailed areas while battling a group of enemies that we see a fairly large gap emerge.

In these instances the PS3 version not only suffers from a greater amount of screen tearing, but many more frames are dropped as well, resulting in some heavy slowdown which serves to dull controller response significantly - in situations like this, gameplay is undoubtedly impacted, and combat is exactly the kind of situation where a consistent frame-rate and controller response is a must.

Oddly enough, there are also a few instances where we see a few short dips in smoothness manifesting on the PS3 during times when there isn't much going on at all. Frames are only dropped for a brief second or two, but this results in a visible judder, which disconnects you from the experience, if only temporarily. Thankfully it is only a minor annoyance and not a major blemish in the grand scheme of things. Both 360 and PS3 versions of Alice: Madness Returns are fairly solid overall, each with their own visual enhancements, but with the Microsoft platform claiming the honours from a performance perspective.

All is not right in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter's domain has become a Communist industrial complex, where giant, living, unblinking teapots have been repurposed as parts of a rickety production line. The Walrus and the Carpenter have taken to performing in a slutty undersea cabaret that hides a gory secret. Worst of all, a massive train shaped like a cathedral on wheels is thundering through the world, leaving destruction and lakes of leathery tar in its wake.

No, sorry, I got that wrong. Worst of all is that exploring Wonderland is, in practice, about as full of wonder as watching paint dry. Paint the colour of blood and dreams, but paint nonetheless.

The first American McGee's Alice, released all the way back in the year 2000, was a passable platformer that was hoisted up and carried by its twisted Wonderland setting. The game asked, if Wonderland represents Alice's imagination and psyche, what would happen if Alice went mad?

And so it told the grim story of Alice's family dying in a fire, and the poor girl continuing to hallucinate from inside a Victorian mental asylum. At the end, Alice quite literally hunted down and murdered her own madness and was released from the real-world asylum.

Alice: Madness Returns sees Alice wandering through the streets of London and continuing to hallucinate, and a terrible evil arising in her mind once again. It's an evil that makes a little less sense this time around, but to say any more would be to spoil some of what little there is to be spoiled in this game. Madness Returns has a lot of problems, but they can all be summarised in a suitably nonsensical way: this game is nowhere near mad enough, and it's also not quite sane enough.

Let's start with the latter: it not being sane and sensible enough.

Simply put, this is just not a great example of ordinary, tried-and-tested game design. Each level of Madness Returns is broadly split into platforming segments, puzzles and combat. The level design of the platforming sections is fine, in the sense that you can and will jump from one floating platform to another without clipping through the floor, but it's mostly uninspired. Similarly, the puzzles are of that sad breed where they don't involve any actual brainpower - you'll find a lever or button, use it, and it will open up a new path through the level that will speed you onwards.

There are plenty of tiny, hidden side paths throughout each level that reward curious players, but the rewards often aren't worth the time spent traipsing to get them. You might find a 'Memory', representing a tiny scrap of dialogue from Alice's history, and you'll probably find an arbitrary number of the teeth used to pay for weapon upgrades that may or may not justify your time spent getting to them. Weirdest of all, you might find one of the game's hundreds of bottles. I collected these with the eagerness of a boy scout until I realised that they served no purpose at all.

Where Madness Returns does shine is in its combat, which offers polished, weighty action that can be tremendously rewarding on those occasions when you emerge from a crowd of enemies without a scratch.

Each of Alice's weapons, which range from a Pepper Pot gatling gun to a deflective umbrella, is mapped to a different button. And while each fight is only ever as complicated as using the right weapon on the right enemy at the right time, things can get tense once you've got several different enemies all circling you. In what is either an homage to or a blatant theft from Bayonetta, Alice actually dodges by morphing into a cloud of butterflies, accompanied by a bit of slo-mo if you dodge at the last second.