There is always much discussion about how there aren’t any ‘serious,’ or ‘mature’ games on the Wii. If MadWorld is such a game then I can do without them on the console. It was certainly touted as a game aimed at an audience who thinks of themselves as ‘serious, mature gamers,’ a real oxymoronic statement. Sega seems to think that said gamers want violence in the place of good, varied gameplay because the one thing MadWorld has in excess is violence. I would argue that they want violence and good gameplay – one out of two doesn’t cut it unless you are thoroughly entertained by mindless violence. For my part, I could also do with just one out of the two, as long as that one is gameplay.

The setting of MadWorld reminds one particularly of The Running Man: a game of life and death has been set up for the entertainment of the rich. These game creators have cordoned off an entire island-city (a la Manhattan) by destroying all its bridges to the mainland and blacking out its media. For some reason the world is doing nothing to fight this. The game’s main character, Jack, enters the game as a contestant, but is really trying to get at the people at the top, or so it would seem. There’s also intrigue surrounding some sort of virus that has been pumped into the game area. Contestants (who are simply locals that bought into the spirit of the times and started to kill their neighbours) score points by killing as many people in as violent a way as possible.

Violence, violence, violence

The premise is a little dodgy, but it sets the scene for what could be entertaining gameplay of the third-person-melee-action kind. You use the nunchuk to move Jack around and the A and B buttons to perform punches and slices. The main problem is a lack of variety of moves: you can only kill a person/zombie in so many ways, and you quite quickly exhaust them all. The game creators also went for extreme shock-value with the finishing moves – Jack has a chainsaw attached to his one arm that is used to perform the worst of them. To score maximum points for a kill (and achieve a super-violence accolade) you need to grab poles and run them through your victim, grab a tyre or barrel and shove it over their heads, then carry them to the nearest “rose bush,” a euphemism for “giant spikes” and slam them into the spike a few times. It’s quite amazing that doing something that insanely violent can become boring after doing it for half an hour.

New killing apparatus are introduced every now and then, but they’re usually just variations of the same thing. One big spike allows you to skewer a bunch of bodies on to it and throw them all onto a rose bush at once. A bat allows you to bat bodies. A guillotine allows you to place your half-dead enemy so that they’re cut up. It’s all a bit mad. Finishing moves require you to emulate a chop motion or a slice-upwards motion with the Wii Remote, making the violence even more direct.

What makes all this violence remotely bearable is the graphics style – everything is in black and white and cel-shaded, with the only other colour being red (used only for blood), so it’s not as graphic as it could be. The graphics style is really effective, and I’d like to see similar methods used in other, less insane, games. What’s also quite effective is the commentary that goes on while you’re playing – it’s a little like WWE commentary and often just as inane, but it’s very slickly put together and some of the jokes are reasonably funny. The only problem is that, like a lot of in-game commentaries, the things they say become old quite quickly and you find yourself wanting to turn it off.

Repetitive violence, and then more violence

The game is set up in old-school-style stages. Choose your stage, get enough points (by killing in creative ways, or just killing a lot of crazies) to unlock the boss battle, fight the boss and clear the stage. The problem is that sometimes it takes 15 or 20 minutes to unlock the boss, and those 15 minutes are spent doing the same thing over and over again to rack up your points. Generally the normal guys don’t provide too much of a challenge and you have a number of lives, so it’s just a matter of time before you unlock the boss.

There is usually also one BloodBath challenge in each stage to break up the monotony – these are mini games that could be playing darts with bodies or throwing as many people as possible onto the “meat press” before it presses. The early bosses are quite easy, but they become much more difficult as you move on – especially so as the controls are of the “tank” variety – Jack just doesn’t move like Kratos or the Prince of Persia, unfortunately. The upshot of all that is you spend the time getting to the boss only to die and have to do it all over again. This is extremely annoying and enough to put one off completely.

In MadWorld the violence is insane, but the main problem is repetitiveness. For the first hour you’re shocked, for the second you’re a little less shocked and reasonably entertained, for the rest you’re numbed to what’s going on but you become bored as you do the same things over and over again. The unique bosses do break up things and are usually challenging (sometimes more because of the controls than anything else), but the fifteen minutes of putting poles into people to get to the boss fight is a lot less interesting than it sounds.

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