Alice VR

« It’s not perfect, but this game fills a niche in the VR market with its entrancing environments and fun take on a compulsive literary tale. Alice VR is best experienced with a set of goggles, but it’s a great experience for anyone. »

« Alice VR doesn’t have the most engaging puzzles, and its slow pace may be off-putting to some, but this VR ‘walking simulator’ through a sci-fi re-imagining of Wonderland is a beautiful, trippy and clever experience. »

« An extremely simple game riddled with bugs and flaws (e.g. hopeless collision detection) and very inconsistent in terms of visuals. [13/2016, p.80] »

« AliceVR blurs the lines between fantasy and reality with a certain amount of competence in its loose sci-fi adaptation of the classic tale Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but pushes too hard to put you into a world where up is down and down is up. Bodily discomfort is a serious concern once you go down this rabbit hole. [Tested with Oculus Rift] »

« Although much more playable on standard PCs, Alice is a great idea lost amid mountains of technical issues in VR. If you have endless amounts of patience and like Lewis Carroll a whole heck of a lot, this is your game. Otherwise, you probably won’t find it your cup of tea. »

« I thought the idea of a sci-fi version of Alice in Wonderlands sounded like a very interesting concept but what got made was just average. Not bad mind you, just average. From the graphics, performance, options, puzzles, story, I can think of much worse games but can also think of much better. For starters outside of mentioning of characters names from the Alice in Wonderland universe you never actually get to meet any of them. The story also just kind of ends without any real finale. It isn't even a case of being setup for a sequel so much as it just ends with no real resolution. Throughout the game it seems to allude to a grand conspiracy or secret that will be revealed but nothing ever is. It seems to set up a much bigger payoff that never happens. You also get a hint of a moral dilemma when you have the option of getting power for your space ship but at the expense of the planet you are getting it from. No consequences for your actions ever take place though. The graphics are decent but not great. You won't be thinking at any time that you're playing the next Crysis but they're not an eye sore either. I did notice that a constant issue throughout much of the game was that certain textures, mainly rocks or parts of walls, would flicker very often from their normal color to black and back again. Not game breaking but annoying. I was using the most recent version at the time which is patch 6. Seeing that the last update was over a year ago I doubt these flickering textures will be fixed. The performance overall was good. My usual frame rate was 90-100 FPS but I had drops to the 40's and 50's sometimes for short periods of a few seconds. It was kind of weird as at no point in the game is a lot going on so I am not sure the cause of the drops. The game also never crashed on me once. I played at highest settings at 1920*1080. There aren't too many options for those who like that sort of thing. The game has no FOV slider, no manual save options, no vsync option, only 4 graphics options. There are 4 settings for AA though and ALT-TAB works without any issues. The game play itself was pretty simplistic. You have to navigate through puzzles to progress while having the option to take fuel you find lying around. There's really only 3-4 types of puzzles that happen over and over though. More often than not your throwing objects at buttons and shrinking down to reach certain areas. None of it was really challenging or engaging. Again, I didn't have a bad experience but can't bring myself to praise any part of the game. It took me 3 hours to finish the game. I did not play with a VR headset. I played on Linux. Overall if you're desperate for a puzzle game give it a go, there is certainly worse games to play and worse ways to spend a few hours but don't expect too much. I give it 6.5/10 My system I used to play the game: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.1.1 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.16.15-76.current »

« [SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.] »