Video games: Alice takes a wild ride in Wonderland

In the land of video game characters who have recently returned from extended leave, all the headlines have gone to Duke Nukem.

But the real success story is Alice. Her comeback validates not only her place in today's gaming climate, but the legitimacy of a genre -- family-friendly platforming wrapped inside a bloody, deranged, Mature-rated shell -- that hasn't had much representation in the 10-plus years since "American McGee's Alice" arrived, left its mark and went.

At its core, the sequel, "Alice: Madness Returns," plays by many of the same rules that governed its predecessor, combining platform-style game play and combat and spreading it across a lengthy (15 hours, give or take) journey through large, diverse and creatively sovereign interpretations of Lewis Carroll's imagination.

Also like its predecessor, "Returns" doesn't exactly conceal its developer's weaknesses. Its graphics are dated in spots. Alice occasionally moves awkwardly. The combat is unwieldy, the camera occasionally squirrelly.

Some players doubtlessly will take issue with the length of "Returns," as well. Considering that it takes roughly three hours to clear each area and how much of that time is spent doing different mixes of the same things, a request for more environments and less time in each isn't unreasonable.

But these gripes look awfully small in the face of everything "Returns" does so much differently than just about every game in existence that isn't its predecessor.

The unwieldy combat, for instance, is forgivable in light of Alice's one-of-a-kind arsenal. Her bloody blade returns as her default weapon of choice, but how does using a hobby horse for more thunderous attacks sound? How about a pepper grinder that fires grains of pepper like bullets, or the Clockwork Rabbit, an adorable time bomb that distracts enemies while Alice multitasks against others? The controls aren't perfect, but they're good enough, and the imaginative weapons pave the way for imaginative attack styles.

The rest of "Returns" -- which overwhelmingly keeps players in Wonderland but also provides glimpses into Alice's dreary real-world life -- benefits from similarly uncaged levels of imagination and confidence. Beyond simply being large enough to hide many optional secrets and accommodate more ambitious segments than its predecessor could handle, the worlds Alice visits provide a magnificently colorful departure from the same old bleak real-world environments while still outclassing those bland locales on the macabre scale.

"Returns" gives each world its own visual voice despite keeping the game play similar throughout, and the disparate designs give the game guidance while keeping things stylistically unpredictable.

Bridges made from playing cards form as you cross them. A ship captain who is a cross between a turtle, camel and cow offers a ride while flying shark skeletons give chase. Wasps made of ink wield samurai swords; trains with cars made of cathedrals soar like planes, and living paintings briefly turn the game into a 2-D environment. Even the "normal" people in Alice's real world look like caricatures.

The continuous stream of detail and surprise works in concert with excellent voice acting to tell a terrifically original tale of a girl gone mad living in a world gone madder.

"Returns" repeats a lot of tricks across its existence, and to a point, it repeats tricks it first played 11 years ago. But when no one else is doing what this one does so strikingly well, the misgivings don't stand a chance at mattering.