Game Reviews

It’s obvious to say that good licensed games are few and far between. But great DS games? They used to be released rather frequently but have significantly dried up in recent years. Imagine our surprise then, when one of the better DS games we’ve seen in the past year turned out to be a platform game based on the latest big Disney movie.

More inspired by Tim Burton’s latest than directly based upon it, Alice In Wonderland is a licensed game that happily puts gameplay first. You don’t control the title character, for instance. Instead, Alice trails behind as you alternate command between the supporting characters of the Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, Absolem the caterpillar and white rabbit, McTwisp. There’s a hint of Ico to the gameplay as you escort Alice through the non-linear (dare we say ‘metroidvania’?) world, protecting her from the playing-card knights that try to abduct her and lending a helping hand at high ledges and wide gaps.

Each of the four playable characters has a unique set of abilities that must be called upon in order to traverse the rather puzzly locations. McTwisp comes over all Blinx The Time Sweeper with the ability to rewind, fast-forward or pause time in order to manipulate the environment around him. Absolem can switch gravity to walk along the ceiling. The Hatter can flip the game world 180 degrees to reveal hidden objects behind the scenes, while the Cheshire cat can make scenery appear or disappear at will. These puzzles are, admittedly, all prescribed junctions in the environment and do feel quite easy at first. A few hours in, however, they increase in complexity and imagination, requiring you to use multiple abilities in quick succession and occasionally think outside the box of the established mechanics.

This is one of the first DS games in a long time, actually, to take advantage of the hardware’s quirkiness in such a way. Take the playing card knights, for example; strike them a few times to strip them of their armour and you can then blow into the microphone to make the paper enemies float away in the breeze. The dungeon map, meanwhile, is made up of jigsaw pieces that can be accessed from the touch screen and re-arranged in order to change the very structure of the game world and create your own shortcuts.