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MadWorld - Source: Gamefreaks -
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Publisher: SEGA
Platform: Wii
Nintendo Wii owners get their second dose of 'mature gaming' in as many months with Sega's MadWorld, an unrepentantly gruesome brawler with an eye-catching black and white aesthetic.
Coming on the heels of the blood- and profanity-laden House of the Dead: Overkill, MadWorld is another welcome change of tone from the traditional, family-friendly Wii atmosphere. Gamers not particularly interested in getting fit or taking part in waggle sports have long cried out to Nintendo in abandonment, and it looks like Sega are the first company to step up and take a stab at what must be a fairly sizable hardcore demographic.
And what a bloody, violent stab it is. Like a cross between Escape from New York and Sin City, MadWorld sees a town locked down by terrorists who have turned the streets into a giant reality TV show called DeathWatch. Contestants, willing and otherwise, compete to see who can commit the most abhorrently brutal crimes against each other in order to score points, attract sponsors, and please the insatiable home viewers.
Players take control of Jack, a gravely mechanic with a retractable chainsaw strapped to his forearm, hell-bent on winning the contest for his own mysterious reasons. Looking like a slightly less demonic version of Hellboy, the stoic hardass cuts a swath of dismembered limbs as he progresses through the various regions of embattled Varrigan City.
The game is a brawler in the classic tradition, there's very little else to the game but wading through streets, killing goon after worthless goon in the most imaginatively horrific manner possible. Jack can deliver a series of bunt punches before finishing his enemies with a fancy death animation, or cut right to the chase and unleash his chainsaw, cleaving bad guys in two for an instant death.
However, the game rewards a more artistic bent to genocide, awarding greater points for slower, more varied beatdowns that include various objects within the environments. Enemies can be impaled on sign posts, jammed into flaming barrels, cut in half by heavy dumpster lids, even mashed up by oncoming traffic, and the more you can chain together the greater your score.
Upon earning enough points each level delivers a weapon of some kind to keep the flaying and gouging interesting. Indeed, the streets run red with blood; MadWorld wades unflinchingly into mindless violence territory, forever goading players to cripple and eviscerate with more creative glee, watchdogs and parent groups be damned. One can't help but admire the game's enthusiasm, but unfortunately large stretches of the game lack the quality to back it up.
Like almost every brawler ever birthed, MadWorld suffers from gore fatigue; that wall a player hits when bending someone's spine in two no longer holds any shock or appeal. A giddily excited attitude towards all things violent is well and good, but when the same excitement can't be inspired within the player for the title's duration the blood and guts start to seem gratuitous, repetitive, and even a little unnecessary. It's a problem MadWorld succumbs to fairly early on in the game, but the developers have done their best to shake things up from level to level.
Upon ploughing through an appropriate amount of chainsaw-fodder, monotonous brawling is punctuated by a level-specific minigame known as a BloodBath Challenge. These games take uninhibited violence to new, comic levels, tasking you with increasingly ridiculous ways of committing murder on a grand scale. One game sees the player whacking goons with a baseball bat into a giant dartboard, while another has Jack turning pesky ninjas into man-sized meat fireworks. Simple and absurd though they may be, the BloodBath Challenges work as a welcome reprieve from the game's often tedious brawling.
Another, less successful strategy to break up the game's repetitive main thrust comes in the form of the ever-pervasive vehicle level. Like any badass worth his salt, Jack rides a hog. Every now and again he likes to hit the highway and commit vehicular homicide instead of garden-variety homicide. These levels are frustratingly undercooked, however, involving limited steering of the motorcycle and two basic attacks; grab left or slash right. The result looks cool but just isn't any fun at all.
After accruing enough points in each level by bashing omnipresent henchmen, Jack is able to battle a DeathWatch champion. These bosses are typically hulking monsters of some descript, although the occasional lithe femme fatale slips in, and each have their own unique fighting style (or rather an easily interpreted movement pattern). Despite the fairly routine nature of the battles, the character designs and cinematic bent of the game aesthetic usually lend an exciting theatricality to the climactic duals.
MadWorld isn't exactly heavy on plot and the few twists and turns that have been shoehorned in strive for a level of seriousness that really isn't very becoming of the title. The characters all take on aspects of a typical B-movie cast, but neither the humour nor testosterone of it all plays very well; so much so that I had to turn the aggressively lame commentators off in order to continue playing. Luckily its not something to get hung up on, as the exposition rarely intrudes upon action.
By far the game's most striking aspect is its bold colour palate; rendered in stark black and white with only jets of bright red blood to colour the screen. The look is supposedly modelled after Frank Miller's art style in Sin City, but that's a bit of a disservice to Mr Miller. Where Sin City made fantastic use of strong negative space, MadWorld looks more like a clutter of undifferentiated detail; with only black and white to distinguish busy environments the world can become confusing and difficult to look at. The style works best when artfully controlled during non-interactive scenes.
While it's certainly not a great game, it is difficult to begrudge MadWorld many of its flaws; despite gameplay being a tad mundane the game is still the most strikingly aggressive, and outright unfriendly game on the Wii in far too long. Variety is something the system desperately needs, and MadWorld is a confident step in that direction.
Synopsis
A nasty little brawler that isn't afraid to corrupt the Wii's core audience, MadWorld might not be the tightest game on the shelf but you would be hard pressed to find another so gleefully happy just to be bad.
This review bought to you by
Gamefreaks.
