American McGee's Alice is one of those games that puts you smack-dab right in the middle of the psychotic atmosphere. Thank you American McGee!

It's the best thing since Sliced Bread, other than its sequel, Sliced Bread II: Electric Boogaloo (Mr. Show quote!) Well, to make it more down to earth, it's the best game of it genre since Heretic II and it's "sequel" Rune.

Alice is now 18 years old, many years from her last visit to Wonderland. She is living happily at home with her parents. After recollecting her adventures in Wonderland one night, she falls asleep. The cat accidentally knocks over some gas, which flows to a nearby fire. Yep, you guessed it, the house becomes engulfed in flames. Alice franticly runs to her parent's room, trying to save them, but they cannot be saved. She suffers hearing them being burned alive as she stumbles out of her house and lies unconscious on the fresh snow outside.

Skip forward a little bit and we find Alice is so traumatized from the experience, she winds up in a mental institution; not moving or talking, just staring into space.

One of the attendants finds the only surviving artifact from the inferno, her rabbit doll. She snuggles it tighter in a daze, as she hears it telling her that Wonderland is in trouble. Apparently the queen has gone bezerk and ravaged all of Wonderland, thanks to Alice's mental incapacitation.

From there she takes a trip back to Wonderland to destroy the Queen and make Wonderland the beauty it once was.

There are four difficulty levels to cater to everyone; Easy, Medium, Hard and Nightmare. Then again, no matter what difficulty you choose, possibly the largest challenges, are found in the actual environments themselves.

There are two bars on either side of the screen. One is a red one, called Sanity. It's basically Alice's health meter. Lose it all Alice is gone. Although in this game it just means you have gone insane. We don't want Alice to die, do we? The blue bar is called Will, it's basically Alice's "ammo" counter. As weapons are used, it goes down. The more powerful the weapon, the more of the bar is used. It slowly regenerates over time, but there is usually a nice supply of Meta-Essences nearby. What are Meta-Essences? They are the life force of Wonderland, and this stuff is gained when you kill an enemy. They come in many shapes and sizes. There are also separate Sanity and Will replenishers scattered throughout the levels. This makes it pretty tough to drain yourself of Sanity and/or Will completely.

The gameplay is very much like Heretic II. You have an over-the-shoulder 3rd person POV, with a little target you can use to aim where you are going to attack. Alice improves further on this technique. If you aim at a person who is in range of attack, the target homes in on the enemy and circles them, making accurate attacking much easier, especially since there are some homing weapons in the game.

Aiming at the ground within the circle of radius of your jumping ability will produce footprints. What do they do? Picture a lava flow, and you need to make a precarious jump to the small island in the middle. If it is close enough for you to jump to, aim the target on the island until the footprints appear. That is your automatic landing point. Then just hit jump, and say thank you to the developers for an accurate jumping scheme!

Somewhat hidden in some levels are power-ups to help Alice get through some trouble spots. There is the 'Ragebox', which turns Alice into a demon hybrid temporarily. Her strength is doubled, and she uses half of her Will to make her a nice killing machine. Grasshopper Tea is, well, a real grasshopper that you catch and drink out of. It temporarily makes Alice ultra-fast, and able to leap tall buildings in a single...you get the idea. The most rare is the Darkened Looking Glass. It's an all-black item, and usually hidden in out-of-the-way shadowy places. Finding it makes you totally invisible for a short amount of time.

The selection of weapons is great. Each one is worthwhile to use; no weapon can really go unused in this game. Most of the weapons have two modes of attack. The normal attack uses a basic amount of Will, and the other is a special attack that uses much more of the Will bar. Your base weapon is a knife, that doesn't use any Will, but still does sizeable amount of close-up damage. The second attack, which throws the knife, is useful even up to the end of the game. Other weapons include rapid-firing homing Playing Cards, an Ice Wand that makes a neat "ice-thrower", a Mallet for an electrified whack, even some Demon Dice. Make a good roll and a Demon comes out to attack anything that moves! My favorite weapon, by far, has to be the Jacks game. Using it sends multiple ricocheting Jacks, which home in on an enemy you target pounding them like mad. While this attack takes place a red ball bounces next to you.

The levels are amazing. More curved surfaces than Quake 3 Arena in some! Levels can be a trippy travel through Wonderland, where the levels morph and move around you. Others put you in ice, lava, caves, gardens, even chessboards and insane asylums! The variety of levels is almost non-repetitive, except for the usual somewhat bland cave levels, which are thankfully few and far between. Most of the stages are so awe-inspiring, you will just spend a bit of time just wandering around looking at everything. It's just too beautiful for words.

In closing, if you love grassroots "platform jumping and switch pulling" games, you will certainly love this. If you love great sound and amazing visuals, you will like also like Alice. Better yet, if you like games, do American "Alice" McGee a favor and buy his masterpiece right now!