Got this yesterday, for the PC, have been playing it fairly non-stop. 5 or so hours in and, man this game is great. I have to say I think this is the most out of touch game reviewers have been about a game this generation (JRPG reviews potentially withstanding).
The combat is totally frenzied and fun, in a world where even hardcore combo-based action games often let you cheese your way through without true knowledge of the mechanics at play. It's refreshing to see a game demand your attention, and stick to it's guns with great design. All the visual and audio cues at work, The variety of weaknesses to exploit and subtle prioritization, sometimes the game even throws environmental hazards into the combat. Making it that much more chaotic and also that much more impressive when it all comes together.
The breakthrough's and eureka moments you have when you reform your tactics on-the-fly to overcome a new, seemingly impossible, set up of enemy's creates the feeling I play games for. That one set up of the crabs with cannon arms and those lungfish that burrow under the sand was a killer, until I started to use the rabbit as a decoy for the smaller enemy's.
The platforming, is also very cool, Alice doesn't have the variety of moves at her disposal as say, a Banjo or Mario, so don't expect to be timing sequences of walljumps and back flips. But as far as pure jumping controls go, she has some of the best, almost too good in fact. 3 times in the game thus far, I've actually managed to reach a platform I wasn't supposed to (because of the flexibility of combining her float and twirl abilities), before realizing I was supposed to hit a switch that activated other platforms or wind-jets used to get to the destination the right way.
The game also does well to take full advantage of the platforming moves at your disposal, I love the sequences where you have to turn small to reveal hidden platforms, moving about, the platforms disappear when you turn big again, sometimes they fade faster than other times. Leaving you to intuit where the platform is now based on the trajectory to observed when you were small (with subtle visual indicators as well, once you're up close). Only in a game with rock solid jumping control could this be pulled off, and "Alice" has it in spades.
Seriously, unless this all falls apart at the end in ways I've never seen a game fall apart before, I don't see how any reviewer could've given this game anything but at least an 8. It's such a refreshing breath of air in a modern military shooter filled environment, and I didn't even talk about the visuals!
