Go ask Alice...I think she'll know

American McGee's Alice is a pretty good first-person shooter game wrapped in a demented, lovingly detailed gameworld.

The background:

Since Alice's last trip behind the looking-glass, things have taken a definite downturn. A fire broke out in her home. Her family died in the fire. She ended up in an asylum.

Not quite a tea party.

Alice is summoned back to Wonderland, only to discover that Wonderland's luck has paralleled her own. The Red Queen has been studying up on the "L'il Evil Despot's Handbook" and has been ruling Wonderland with an iron hand. Its denizens are now her slaves. Sort of like that boss from hell everyone's worked for at some point. Alice's job is to rid Wonderland of the Red Queen and pretty much her entire army.

The gameworld & its denizens

To begin with, the gameworld is amazing. There's no other way to put it. Alice, herself, sports a similar dress to the one she wore first time around -- except now she's added some occult symbols to the front and sports a skull on the bow on the back. (Apparently she predicted the goth movement 130 years or so before it actually came around.) She's traded in her maryjanes for knee-high boots, and she's a teenager or young adult.

Alice's voice acting appears most often in the game (well, she IS the main character). Her voice is a bit of a surprise -- she sounds so nice and sweet. Sort of like Dr. Corday on E.R. In several of the gazillion cutscenes, she rocks back and forth on her heels rather shyly, which is an interesting thing to do for someone whose job is to kill most of the people she meets.

The gameworld itself is very detailed and rich. You certainly never get the idea that the developers used a few Doom levels to build the game. Bizarre buildings, detailed textures, and well-built patterns abound.

Alice's enemies and allies also show a great deal of work. The Cheshire Cat now sports an earring and appears at different points to give advice or tell you what to do. The documentation for the game claims that he's often cryptic. If that's the case, he needs to brush up a bit; most of the time it's fairly easy to tell what he means. His voice actor is pretty good too; he's reminiscent of a feline Hannibal Lecter. Most of the others are well done, with the exception of the Troll Elder, who looks rather like a human dressed like a Smurf and rather glaringly sports an American accent whereas the other characters have English ones. Even the card guards, the most common enemy (you know...the grunts), are really a treat to look at.

The gameplay:

Well, it's pretty standard. For all the amazing gameplay, there isn't a lot of difference between playing Alice and playing its forebears (Doom, Half-Life, Quake, etc.) Alice is based on the Quake III engine, and while it's done amazing things for the graphics, the gameplay is your average run, kill the enemy, solve a few puzzles, get cool weapons, kill more enemies, run some more. It's rather linear in nature -- no real doubling back. The puzzles in the game aren't terribly hard.

Control in the game is crisp. Oh, sure, occasionally you'll plummet to your death while doing a run and jump puzzle, but that's OK. The most annoying thing I found was that the default setup requires one to use the mouse to attack -- Half-life, for example, allows you to hit the enter key to shoot. Alice does not as a default. This can get annoying if an enemy sneaks up on you.

Weapons in this game, while supposedly toys that Alice is playing with, fall neatly into standard categories. You start off with the knife. Cards serve as a gun to shoot at enemies far away with. The croquet mallet is a harder-hitting close-quarters weapon than the knife.

Other stuff:

Alice is a big old resource hog. I have a 32 meg video card, a 1.2 ghz Athlon, and 512 megs of RAM (it went on sale), and I can run it just fine. Lower-end machines will have quite a bit more problem rendering those graphics.