Comic-book visuals, mindless violence and lewd humour? What's not to like?
MadWorld brags its unique artstyle. There's very conspicuous and individual artwork for the game. Comic book style, black-and-white graphics with the rest of the screen probably swamped with red blood. The odd graphic-novel style gives all the hellish activities and bloody pools both a more satisfying and comedic feel. It's also a very unique features, very few games have attempted to implement monochromatic colour schemes, especially when other colours are available, but MadWorld deviates from humble conformity. Problems do crop up with the ambiguity silhouetted graphics, which is unfortunate, because adjusting to recognising what something is when it's, essentially, an outline takes some time.
The gameplay is fun and has no notable issues. Admittedly, the game is short - a few hours long, but it's brilliant. You get provided a variety of options on how to go about bloodily slaughtering your foe. You can impale his head using a sign-post, shove a bin over him, place a tire around him, smash his head into a toilet, put a sign-post through his head and then slice him in half with a chainsaw . . . Or just a simple punch in the face for standing in your way. Not only that, the game rewards you for gorily killing an enemy with points which unlock weapons like a spiked club or events where, for example, you have to chuck people onto railroads so they get crushed by oncoming trains. In fact, the gameplay made me question just how sadistic I really was. Stabbing a guy with a spike that impales his behind and protrudes his skull - would I really do that for the points? In MadWorld I would.
Furthermore, at various stages in levels bosses, or at least enemies that are more difficult to kill (like an over-sized Minotaur) appear. These are normally killed using quick time events. One big flaw in the combat system, however, is how over-powered the chainsaw is. The big Minotaur gets massacred in amongst the cacophony of helpless whims in an attempt to negotiate mercy, but a few ginger strokes from the chainsaw and the room falls silence with a bull's corpse sprawled out after a re-enactment of seventeenth-century surgery. Granted, you can't kill bosses quickly without the aid of finishing quick time events and don't accumulate as many points for using the chainsaw either, but the chainsaw easily becomes the primary weapon in your wide arsenal.
Another thing you must appreciate the game for is its script, characters and voice acting. Two hosts for the TV programme that airs footage of Death Watch say some of the funniest lines in the entire game. They often inject irresistibly witty, profane, sexual and harsh jokes-and, to my surprise, I was actually pausing in the midst of bloody train stations and markets to listen to the amusing commentary. There are even good puns in tutorial notices, and at the start of challenges you'll see the Black Barron, a pimp who encourages gory murder, getting killed after some well-executed jokes. The jokes are humorous and it's probably worth buying it just to laugh at the lewd humour that incessently flows from your television. The soundtrack is also good. It offers a sort of hip-hop playlist which fits the violence, pimps, sexual jokes, swearing and blood. The rap-style music might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's certainly fitting.
About the only major problems I could raise besides needing to get used to the graphics and the relatively short campaign is probably the camera. The camera does not follow Jack and so in the middle of an insane battle you may be missing the mayhem. A button does reposition the camera but this is a painful inconvenience that slows down the action.
So overall, this game is great and definitely worth the purchase. It has humour, blood and guts, violence and on top has fitting sound effects and music and even unique graphics. Even the downfalls in this game can be fixed manually once you get used to it, so really there's no major flaws in the game. This is definitely one of the few titles on Wii I'd say "Go out, right now, and buy it. Yes, now."
8.5/10