I, on the otherhand, had to reset and replay until finally my savefile let me have an umbrella. My friend did manage to finish the game without using the Umbrella. I heard a rumor the umbrella being unusable was supposedly a trap for the pirated copies) that made the game somewhat unplayable. It had a few glitches here and there (like the umbrella being unusable for some players, even those who purchesed the game legally.
I loved the upgrade in the combat system. I especially loved the different outfits and what they do. The visuals, the weirdness and the story did not disappoint me. I wanted so badly to go back to Wonderland. When Alice: Madness Returns was first teased, I was extremely excited. The way American McGee twists the childhood stories we grew up with in his work (See also American McGee's Grimm) is something that I have always admired.Īfter I finished the first game when I was in highschool (yes, I discovered the game late). I love the darkness and the overall weirdness in this franchise. That was one of the first games that really made me fall in love with gaming. Moreover, the game doesn’t take advantage of quadcores.Let me start this review by talking about the prequel, the cult classic, American McGee's Alice. Those of you with middle-end PCs should select either Medium or Low PhysX.
Players will need a high-end PC to enjoy it to the fullest with High PhysX settings. All in all, Alice: Madness Returns is a demanding game due to the PhysX physics.
Most of the characters are highly detailed and especially Alice’s model. ‘Alice: Madness Returns’ also features some modern-day effects, like motion blur, depth of field during the cut-scenes, HDR and soft particles. The lighting system and the color palette that has been used are great and add a lot to the game’s atmosphere. This is art my friends, and it’s quite obvious that Spicy Horse Games has some amazing artists. The dark and gothic style of Wonderland is unmatchable and Spicy Horse Games managed to deliver some extraordinary visuals with some average assets. Graphics wise, the game is perhaps among the most atmospheric games of 2011, even though it’s plagued with lots of low-resolution textures. On the other hand, if you have a Tri-SLI system, we’d suggest dedicating one card to PhysX and running the game in SLI mode. Therefore, we strongly suggest disabling SLI if you have only two Nvidia cards. Performance was far better with this configuration, although there were still some unjustified drops to mid-30s.
So we decided to disable SLI and dedicate one of our cores to the PhysX calculations. In fact, both of our GPU cores were at around 40%. The weird thing is that our cards weren’t pushed at all when we were witnessing such a low framerate. There were occasions where our framerate dropped to mid-20s during some combats where there were lots of particles on-screen. Performance wise, these PhysX effects are quite demanding, especially if you choose the High PhysX settings. Spicy Horse Games provided the hardware GPU PhysX path to offer better performance, instead of exclusive physics effects. On top of that, those owning an AMD/ATI card will also be able to enable the PhysX effects. This is perhaps one of the best subtle implementations of PhysX effects, and we hope that more developers will follow Spicy Horse Games’ example. Without them, the battles feel ‘empty’ and kind of dull, without any resolution or wow factor. They truly add to the whole immersion and gaming experience.
We have to admit that the game’s PhysX effects are amazing. Without any FPS restrictions, we could easily gather a lot of information about the PhysX implementation, how it scales to multiple CPUs and if players will be benefited from SLI configurations. The game is powered by Nvidia’s PhysX and unlike other games, it supports hardware GPU PhysX. It’s quite easy and you can find out how here. The game has a 30fps cap, and we had to edit our configuration files to remove it.
As always, we used an overclocked Q9650 (4.2Ghz) with a GTX295, 4GB DDR2, Windows 7 64Bit and Nvidia’s latest ForceWare drivers. Alice’s inner world collapses, Wonderland is in danger and players need to fight their way and ultimately save Wonderland. Developed by Amerinan McGee’s team, ‘Alice: Madness Returns’ follows Alice on a journey through a wildly corrupted and shattered Wonderland to uncover the truth behind her haunted past and tortured psyche. EA has finally released the sequel to one of the greatest third person games.