Reviews from

in the past


From what I played it was pretty good however I just lost motivation to play the game. It was dated but in a good way it has all the charm a piece of Alice in wonderland media should have the character design was very unique as well as the music however the platforming was a bit clunky the combat 100% screams a pc game as well I can't imagine playing this on controller. Maybe one day I'll replay this but for now I think it's time for me to mark this game as shelved.

Although harder than the 2nd game, this game is incredibly good and charming in its own way.

The more I played, the more I wanted to play it. It had a few bugs, and the maze level frustrated me sometimes, but it's overall a fun game and a big mark for the video game culture.

really nice game if you can get past some of the jank.

Aesthetics and design wise its almost perfect but it's still a clunker to play. I remember even a few years after it came out I thought it was a bit janked. Still worth a play.

American Mcgee's Alice may be my favorite adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. In terms of writing and atmosphere, it's certainly the cream of the crop. What Rouge Entertainment accomplished on the Quake 3 engine, of all things, is nothing short of incredible. I genuinely think when it comes to translating an Art style with the tech they had, they couldn't have done better. The dark, twisted atmosphere is killer and the soundtrack unmatched. The voice acting is also one of the best I have ever heard, with Sussie Bran as Alice and Roger Jackson as the cheshire cat beeing pitch perfect. I could honestly listen to them banter for ages. Its all wonderful, except for the gameplay. That is an entirely different can of worms.

Alice suffers what I like to call "second half dropoff syndrome". An unfortunate decease many, many games up until fairly recently have suffered from. Basically the first half is excellent, falls right into what its gameplay limitation are capable of, but then you hit the midway point. From then on it becomes awful, with bullshit enemies, instant death pits and levels that stretch on for way too long. For Alice, that point is about when you reach the level Mirror Image, the mad hatters' domain. The platforming turns to shit and most of the weapons become useless. The ice wand is already crazy overpowered, but introducing the jabberwocky's eye staff makes even that redounded. It kills all the challenge, and now the only threats are instant death pits. Unlucky then that Alice has tons of enemies who's single job it is to push you off narrow pathways. Great. I don't exactly think we needed that in a game where jumping isn't great to begin with. I probably shouldn't be surprised about those issues, considering American Mcgee used to work at Id software and many of Alice's exact issues can be found in Id's early catalog. The storm on the red queen's castle was a slog, combining all those issues. The atmosphere still fucks, but it's the point where I wouldn't blame anyone for just watching a Let's play instead.

I still recommend you check out Alice in any way you see fit because I think it's one of the defining pieces of Video Game art from the early 2000s, that sadly never got the spotlight it deserved. On the bright side, EA pretty much stopped giving a shit about the series and now just sells its sequel completely DRM free. So it's super easy to mod the original into the sequel, since it was originally sold as a bonus DLC remaster for Alice: Madness Returns. You can then just access it through the main menu of Madness Returns. So fuck EA and pirate the fuck out of their games. Rise up, Goth Gamer Nation.


The combat is bad and the platforming is bad, but the game undeniably has a vibe. Unfortunately it's very similar to the vibe of that girl in your 10th grade English class that wore Nightmare Before Christmas pajama pants to class every day.

eu posso odiar muitas partes da gameplay com toda minha alma MAS caralho a estética faz tudo valer MUITO A PENA

esse gráfico é meu tipo de problema mental

Lo conocí por la secuela. Intenté jugarlo, entiendo que es de hace como 20 años pero no pude pasar de media hora de juego. Los controles, el movimiento, pelear contra enemigos, todo era raro, lento y no me gustó. Los escenarios tampoco, dropeado.

To reimagine Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a grimdark third person shooter is a silly concept looking back, but it ultimately works wonders thanks to amazingly polished visuals and soundtrack that serve as a wonderful time-capsule of late 90s to early 2000s PC game aesthetics. These aesthetics carry the game for the entire duration of its runtime, even despite its simple story and somewhat bare mechanics.

As a proper shooter, the game doesn't aim to exceed anything that existed at the time. Though the level design lends itself to inventive environments, and the variety of different weapons is welcome, there is not much to differentiate this game from others of the time. In fact, due to poor weapon balance, some frustrating enemy design, and unwieldy platforming, I tend to find Alice to be falling a bit behind its contemporaries in the gameplay department, even if it does more than make up for it in terms of aesthetics.

I love this game. Never got to play it on the PC when it came out so I was happy to get it for free with the second game. The graphics are dated but still pretty good. Music is great. Over all gameplay and design is solid.

This game is a strange relic.

Its atmosphere is potent and as a sucker for anything based on Alice in Wonderland I was immediately pulled into this dark, twisted version of Wonderland. The art style and music are still great to this day.

The weakest part of this game is playing it.

It's billed as a platformer but it's closer to a third person shooter. The platforming is stiff and janky and feels nothing like the good platformers of the era. The game is mostly about fighting all sorts of bizarre creatures with a large arsenal of weapons. Their designs are very creative which is a plus, but they all feel like you're slapping enemies with a pool noodle, so the combat doesn't feel very good.

The cool theme is enough to make this worth playing if it interests you, but definitely play it on PC, and be prepared to save a lot. If this game didn't have quick saves I definitely wouldn't have finished it.

Did American McGee never play a single good 3D platformer before the development of this game?

Even then, this is the equivalent of putting Quake, Coraline and Tim Burton (and Danny Elfman) ALL INTO ONE, and for that reason I like It.

I losted faith in humanity when EA games decided not to work with American Mcgee anymore.

i haven't beaten this game yet but the final hour could kill my dog and i would still think it's a pretty cool game. the vibes are kind of sort of incredible, this game is so bustling with life

A PC Gaming darling.
On my most recent playthrough I played on the PS3 version which sadly has its technical issues. Still very playable but I would prefer to play the PC version instead.

There is a slight sophistication that I really like about this game. Something I felt was lost in the 2011 sequel.

Here's hoping it gets on GOG some day.

This review contains spoilers

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall" - Mojo Jojo Cheshire Cat

In a way this is sort of a reflection of many games that suffer from eventually starting to run out of steam or start to get irritating after a while, with (American McGee's) Alice being a very good example of this...

IN FACT, after playing through other games that released after this (particularly Max Payne 1 and 2, Clive Barker's Undying and Prince of Persia The Sands of Time), my opinion on this game was slowly starting to deteriorate over time, where as I originally used to praise this with the "competent, if janky gameplay with good art direction and incredible soundtrack", I my opinion now feels more aligned to this:

"Bad gameplay with good art direction and incredible soundtrack"

And also in a few ways, I start to think more and more that after American McGee left id Software, it seems as though he became more and more someone who has great ideas for stories, AKA an AuTeuR rather than someone who actually knows how to make good video games, which in of itself is fine, Suda51 and Tim Schafer are also other people I could say the same about, the main difference is that their "best" work, particularly Killer7 and Psychonauts respectively, still have generally decent gameplay but have genuinely incredible stories that truly use the medium of video games to their fullest extent, where the more you explore and think about every single bit of imagery appearing, the more information you learn about its characters, their worlds and plots that otherwise you could have just easily brushed off without ever noticing. And this is not even talking about others like Fumito Ueda and Hideo Kojima.

I mean, sure he may not be (and thankfully isn't) a David Cage, where that guy just want to turn games into playable movies, which is just a stupid way of seeing games as "mature", if anything they would just go backwards if that kind of stuff happened, but it seems as though with McGee he tried to do something similar with the people I mentioned in the last paragraph, except that the gameplay (atleast in Alice) is just bad instead of competent-to-good like those two examples I mentioned before, which is baffling because unlike Suda or Tim, he worked on id Software as I mentioned before (as a level designer that is but still, he was one of the OGs), and at the time he worked on id Software, their games were considered the gold standard for first person shooters, particularly DOOM 1/2 and Quake, though to be fair, it was his first attempt in his career not only as the main head behind the game's development, but also his first attempt at doing a game outside the FPS genre so I might be more lenient with some of these issues, but then a few other questions arise:

Did American McGee never play a single good 3D platformer before the development of Alice?

Who in the right mind would use id Tech to make a third person shooter with platforming?

Though the answer for that second question is pretty obvious, since, again, he was once a member of id Software, that and he was working with Rogue Entertainment (one of the developers who had the most experience working with different versions of id Tech alongside Raven Software) as well, so naturally he would probably pick the Quake 3 Arena engine as his choice, doesn't help that another studio called Ritual Entertainment had also used that same engine to make a game with a similar gameplay style called Heavy Metal F.A.K.K 2, so McGee already had somewhat of a basis for what the gameplay of Alice could be.

But now it is about time I started to talk about the game itself, so I shall start with the bad right away, the gameplay... Holy man the gameplay...

Though it doesn't immediately starts out bad, in fact the earlier levels fare relatively well gameplay-wise, even if there are still issues like the impossibly bad melee combat (unlike a Jedi Academy) and cheap death traps in the same veins as the ones present in id Software's Doom, and in fact I don't really mind the ammo for every weapon being tied to a single mana bar (also called Willpower(?) in the game), since throwing the knife Vorpal Blade still deals a relatively good amount of damage against enemies for no cost at the expense of a longer cooldown for each attack (atleast early on), and later on the game introduces even more weapons that are both fun to use and relatively powerful, the Jacks and the Toybox (that's definitely not how it is called but I forgot the name so I will just call it that), the latter in particular is pretty good against bosses since it lights them on fire, making them take damage over time.

But then something happens that derails the combat into the worse, and that point is when you get the Jabberwock Staff, which at first I thought was just the classic McGuffin that would only be used to unlock the path into the Red Queen's Castle and that's it, but it is actually a weapon, a way too overpowered one at that, it throws a huge cock into the weapon balancing, and just about annihilates every single enemy coming at you, combine this with the overwhelming amount of enemies the game throws at you in certain levels after getting the Jabberwock Staff and the relatively low amounts of mana the weapon costs, it makes every single weapon completely redundant and trivializes almost all combat sections.

But combat isn't the only activity you will be engaging with throughout the game, there is also platforming, and again, I still wonder whether American McGee had played any good 3D platformer before the development of this game, because the platforming here sucks badly!!! Even if this game was released only a few years after the first major ones started to appear in the market, Super Mario 64 was released on the same year Quake 2 released, so I wonder why didn't McGee take atleast a few more cues from that game when it comes to the platforming in this game, since at the time it was one of the staples of 3D platformers. Alice's jump is really borked and feels like jumping in the moon, whenever you grab a ledge your camera turns into Alice's back which can really fuck up your jumps at times, and lastly are the certain platforming challenges involving those annoying flying demons that screech at you, pushing Alice into death pits, forcing you to savescum even more than what you would normally do everywhere else in the game, it sometimes manages to be as bad, if not worse than the platforming sections of Max Payne 1.

And I didn't even touch on the level design of this game, because honestly it is just mostly fine (if pretty unremarkable), most combat sections take place in tight hallways, with the boss arenas mostly being just big circles, with only the Red Queen's boss fight particularly standing out (in general I would say) and the platforming segments (when they aren't excruciatingly annoying due to certain enemies) have a fine level design that would have been much more welcome in other 3D platformers with much better controls.

But to be honest, while in terms of gameplay it fumbles pretty badly in certain areas, it is everything else that truly makes me like this game more than I would normally.

I will just start with the art direction first, which is generally really good (heck I love even the cover art). This distorted and demonic version of Wonderland is absolutely brought to life with the fantastic(al) characters and environmental designs, bringing characters from the classic Lewis Carroll story into the nightmarish territory with details that already made them odd further accentuated and new details that make them more terrifying than ever, particularly the Cheshire Cat with its exaggeratedly devilish Chuck Jones's The Grinch-esque grin(ch), and don't even get me started on the environments, making certain levels that would otherwise be very forgettable into something more special, and there is a decent variety of them too, with my personal favorites being the Pale Realm and even the Red Queen's Castle have a really strong visual design to it, mixing the architecture you would expect from the castle of the Queen of Hearts in the original story with the lovecraftian-esque fleshy tentacles devouring it, and those levels are pretty open in space (while still linear) so they have more time to shine, and then we have the Mad Hatter's Domain, mixing the already demonic architecture of this version of Wonderland and further complementing it with the mechanical monstrosities created by the Mad Hatter himself found in those levels. In general the art direction is an absolute sight to behold, and I played this on the original 2000s release, so I can bet that it may look even better on the remaster.

However, if there is one thing that will always sound great regardless is the soundtrack, composed by Chris Vrenna from Nine Inch Nails (originally going to be Marilyn Manson of all people), and I gotta say, unlike the engine used for this game, choosing him as the composer for this soundtrack was the perfect pick, the OST elevates this game to me (alongside the general art direction and story). The soundtrack evokes more Tim Burton rather than Nine Inch Nails in many ways, managing to be both whimsical and haunting at the same time, with the strong presence of the chorus making some songs all the more harrowing, but alongside the chorus there are also a bunch of rather unconventional instruments like clocks and bells, sometimes constantly ticking throughout the song, all in harmony with the main instruments to further contribute to this game's atmosphere, one of a dying mind and world, where hope still persists in the saving of it, and Alice is the key to saving Wonderland. Easily one of my favorite soundtracks in any game ever.

I deliberately decided to relegate the story to way later, since I wanted to get the rest out of the way first. There is a book that originally came with the game that would explain in more detail the events that occurred before the start of the game, but for the purposes of this review I will ignore it, since I find it rather unfair to judge a game's story based on supplementary material.

But even then, the story of this game, while superficially its pretty standard, it becomes more interesting when you start delving deeper into it. Alice's story themes are deeply rooted in traumas and troubled pasts, and her house getting lit on fire, killing her entire family, scarred her for the rest of life, and her mental scars not only turned Wonderland into a devilish and decaying world, but also got carried over to there as well, and this is evident not only by the fact the arena for the first Jabberwock boss fight takes place in a burning house, but also the first level in the Mad Hatter's domain (called Beyond the Looking Glass in the game) taking place in a asylum, and you fight Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, shown to be treating Alice in that horrible asylum, that and its distorted and cerebral design both in visuals and level design further show signs that Alice was abused and mistreated in that Asylum, further contributing to her frail mental state. Its also very fitting that the Cheshire Cat (played by the legendary Roger Jackson) is Alice's main companion throughout the game, since her cat was one of the few survivors of that incident with the house burning alongside her, so for many years the cat was her only real companion.

This game's Queen of Hearts honestly deserves her own paragraph, she is possibly one of my favorite villains in any game, easily in my top 10, there is a lot to her. First of all, one touch I really love about her is that, despite some characters referencing her, you never actually get to know how she actually looks like until the very end of the game, which adds a almost lovecraftian feel to her character. But wait, there's more, she isn't called the Queen of Hearts for nothing, the Hearts part is particularly important, since as mentioned by the Centipede earlier on in the game, you must defeat her to make Wonderland great again, but she is not just the HEART of all the horrors of Wonderland, she is the embodiment of Alice's traumas all into one, deeply rooted into Alice's mind, and to defeat her means also escaping the cycles of guilt and suffering from all the scars that came from the past (scars which are represented by the three frames with the Jabberwock, Tweedle-who and the Mad Hatter, all representing three of Alice's traumatic scars), but traumas aren't that easy to escape from, and it becomes more obvious by what she says before her second phase:

"I rule Wonderland alone.Your interference will not be tolerated. This realm is for grown ups alone; raw, well-ordered, ruthless, careening on the jagged edge of reality. Self-pitying dreamers are not allowed here; they cannot survive here."

"You fear the truth. You live in shadows. Your pathetic attempts to reclaim your sanity have failed. Retreat to the sterile safety of your self-delusions, or risk inevitable annihilation."

"If you destroy me, you destroy yourself! Leave now and some hollow part of you may survive. Stay, and I will break you down; you will lose yourself forever."

But despite everything, she still manages to defeat her, and manages to save both her mental state and Wonderland, while being capable of moving on from the scars of her past instead of clinging onto them for years to come. The last thing I want to gush about the Red Queen before finally moving on is her amazing boss fight (the first phase that is), her boss fight not only has a unique design for her arena, but is also far more challenging while still being fair, having attacks that can be devastating but still be dodged using the pillars present in the level, too bad her second phase is so disappointingly easy (doesn't help that you can get the secret weapon there too, in which you can't in the first phase unless you went through a secret passage way before her boss fight).

I may have been a bit of a asshat towards McGee in those first few paragraphs, but really, despite all of the mechanical failings of this game, he still managed to make something so unmistakably of his own mind, with such a incredible art direction and especially marvelous soundtrack by Vrenna, with a story that manages to have more than meets the eye and is somewhat inspired by American McGee's life, it is very evident he put his heart and soul into this game.

It is a genuine piece of ART, maybe mechanically failing art, but still absolute ART!

Edit: In fact, I take back what I said about I started to slowly dislike this game more and more, I might even like it more and more as I think about it.

Primero que nada, no sabía que este juego existia antes de jugar Alice: Madness Returns, con razón muchas de las cosas del juego no me hacían sentido.
Es un juego entretenido pero muuuuuuuuuuuy tosco, le tienes que tener mucha paciencia, los combates con jefes son complicados más que nada porque no se tiene una forma de esquivar más que saltar.
No lo hubiera podido pasar si no existiera la opción de guardar cuando se te diera la gana.

One of the best interpretations of Alice in Wonderland that this universe can have. She is frightening, everyone around you wants to kill you, but you can also let your guts out in response. 50% madness and 50% ultraviolence. This is not just a game, this is art and how unforgettable it can be through time.

Одна из лучших интерпретаций Алисы в стране чудес, которая может быть в этой вселенной. Она пугает, все окружение хочет вас убить, но и вы можете пустить кишки наружу в ответку. 50% безумия и 50% ультранасилия. Это не просто игра, это искусство и насколько оно может быть незабываемым сквозь время.

I decided to play this game before Madness Returns and my god what a mistake.

This game fails in nearly everything it tries to accomplish. Platforming feels terribly imprecise and janky, combat is stiff and lacks any kind of impact, the soundtrack is repetitive, puzzles have no fun factor and it might have some of the worst boss encounters ever designed. Not to mention the level design...

The writing is fine, but doesn't save how shallow the story feels. The idea is actually good, but it doesn't go as deep as it should, it seems. Not to mention how hard it is to actually care for anything happening to the plot when the gameplay feels so abysmal.

Sisuals and tone were the only good things to come out of it. I wasn't expecting to be creeped out by some of the visual design in this game. Enemy variety helps as well. Boss fights were atrocious, but they were cool to look at, at least. And the soundtrack may suck, but the actual sound of the game feels freaky.

But style, on its own, couldn't save Alice. I'd recommend this to no one. I finished this game out of spite and hope that the sequel is good.

You move between London and Wonderland. One is a horrible place of scum and villany full of corruption, the other is just Wonderland

Amazing dark version of the alice in wonderland story

Aesthetically incredible, story has its weaknesses but so so worth the play

This particular version was just not done very well. Controls are unresponsive and the hit detection is just ridiculous. Couldn't get through it. I'm sure the original PC version played better.

I’ve been curious about Alice: Madness Returns so I figured that I would check the first game out before playing (which is actually included in its entirety in Madness Returns). The series is about a girl with mental issues, who retreats into Wonderland in her mind.

I’ll be blunt: just start with the sequel. The plot in this is very thin so you won’t be missing out on anything important. It was originally released on Xbox, but it’s so clunky that if someone had told me that it was an early PlayStation game, I wouldn’t have realised it wasn’t.

The biggest issue is jumping: there’s a big wind up animation which makes the jump actually happen on-screen a second after you press the button, and it doesn’t seem to take momentum into account at all. A jump at full speed feels the same as a stationary jump. It makes the platforming segments a nightmare to play – to the point where I was saving after every single jump, due to how unresponsive the game felt.

The other large part of the game is combat, which is also not good: take the parts of the original Doom that feel dated, then ignore the parts that make it fast, smooth and fun. That is the feeling I got from the combat in American McGee’s Alice. You’ll also resort to using only a handful of weapons, as some are a lot more powerful than others. Enemies are also purposefully designed to be annoying, with flying enemies that blow you around with gusts of air, enemies that freeze you, or ones that fly up really high and drop explosives on you.

The level design is also disorientating, not in a whimsical way, but in a “everything looks the same so I’m not sure if I’m going backwards” way. The graphics are just dark (not thematically dark, literally dark) and the different areas don’t feel like part of the same world.

There are some nice ideas in the game, but it’s just not nice to play.


Apesar de ser um produto do seu tempo, é um jogo bem interessante. É uma versão bizarra e pertubadora (no bom sentido) de Alice. O maior problema é que por ser um jogo antigo, os controles podem ser complicados, mas não deixei de ter uma boa experiência.

Amazing aesthetic and compelling - if not frustrating - gameplay.

Very creepy, yet still so awesome. The soundtrack is a banger, and the combat actually felt super rewarding to get good at. The boss fights are a bit lacking and the story can be confusing at points, but it's still a fantastic game.

the world is a fun take on the source material but the game part is just alright