Late Night Madness

Sorry I've not posted in some time, Haven't been feeling well. I have however been keeping myself distracted with video games. Good news is this gives me a chance to talk about them. The steam sales may be partially to blame. Best news is Alice, Madness Returns finally arrived, and I've been waiting for that for a long time.

First impressions on that, now I finally have a PC version I'd like to play, it's absolutely gorgeous. I loath EA for multiple reasons, but I am so far massively impressed with the art direction and recommended the game to my friends, and anyone else on the fence about it. The physics, the enemies and themes. I've always been a sucker for liquid based physics (games like hydrophobia) and an oil based theme for most of the enemies who leave their corpse splattered over the walls is just the game showing off to me. Won't even get started on it's topic of insanity.

One aspect I absolutely love about it is it seems to toss it up and had side scrolling shooter parts, puzzles and the like in case you get bored of platforming and actioning.It also handles these things with unique controls, as opposed to say, awkward swimming controls scenes with Mock Turtle, not that I'm bitter about any certain scene like that.

And oh boy the water level, when you're trying to plan a game involving a lot of interaction with an evil, helpful and informative fish character, is just made of ideas...

A major problem is it's finally a game that my computer can't handle. High physics setting kills it and a lot of physics objects on medium (Which a certain weapon creates a lot of) does the same thing. Maybe I should look into upgrading again. Probably not essential, though.

Another smaller problem is a weird sort of inconsistency with health, there's a million 'instant death' pits everywhere you'll wall into a lot, only to reappear zelda esque with you walking back into the room, but if you die by the loss of health against enemies, you game over and have to continue from one of the magical invisible checkpoints which may be several rooms back. Annoying, but even more so the game's started to put pits which take a little health away as you fall into them for the 'soft' instant health, so you can't predict if you're dying in a good way or a bad way. Nothing but destroying things (boxes or enemies) gives you health back in either case, too.

Also the lock on control on PC is by default, caps lock. Unique, it makes it easy to control, but very annoying until you remap it if you multitask.

As always, I'm a cynic and will hold off on final opinions until I've beaten it, where I fully expect it to ruin itself and I've had time to mull it all over, I may provide a review then.