MadWorld oozes with gory creativity, and truly artistic style.
The story of MadWorld takes place in a murky, comic-book city named Varrigan City is in trouble by a group of terrorists named: The Organizers. There, the Organizers have hacked into Varrigan City's entire communincation and transformation methods that would deliever a vaccine that would kill people the city less than 24 hours. The vaccine is spreading like wildfire around the city. Now, a show named DeathWatch, with in aid of a big cash prize that will help citizens get rid of the vaccine. It's up to Jack Cayman, a man wih a chainsaw in his arm, to gain sponsors for the event.
The story of Madworld, illustrated in bueatifully vivid comic book panels, done with the dark, if not gritty and realistic tone of a city's controversy, keeps Madworld's realtively short-lived story worth paying attention to. The script, carrying a tongue-in-cheek, contrasting nature makes the character of Jack himself, smoothly register gruff, tough anger, and some surprsingly convincing moments of emotion. The problem with Madworld's story is that at times, the script feels slightly superficial. The dialouge is considerably expected, and the twists and turns feel like nice efforts to say the least. Regardless however, MadWorld's narrative does the job, and poses an intruiging, creative look at worldwide controversy, through some nice comic-book panel cutscenes.
The gameplay of MadWorld contains different segents of Varrigan City split into several parts, and each of them are large arenas of the game's game show: DeathWatch. The progression in each level is done in a linear fashion, with bonus challenges and minni-bosses optional. The idea of MadWorld's gameplay is to see how creatively you can take out an enemy. The more points gained, the more style of attacks and challenges recieved. In most of the levels there are 'BloodBath Challenges' that require the player to kill a certain amounts of enemys in a certain amount of time. There are some brief motorcycle segments in there as well, but they are serviceable and nothing special.
For the most part, MadWorld's wonderful gameplay gives you just as much freedom as GTA. MadWorld's gameplay just quite simply never runs out of innovative ideas to take out an enemy, and the hook of MadWorld therefore, is definetely gripping. MadWorld is sadly though a brief blast. Sega has been known to not really amping up the difficulty level, and sadly enough, MadWorld is no exception. MadWorld does offer strong replay value with the bonus challenges, but even they don't push the game. Even still, MadWorld's innovative control scheme with the Wii remote just adds to the game's hook, and even though the game's short, the hook is just irresitably fun.
MadWorld generally suffers from recycled level design. Every segment looks the same, and the variety of MadWorld's gameplay holds up great, but also sadly uneven. MadWorld does look bueatiful, but also the same. MadWorld's camera is also fustratingly tempromental. There is just too much percision required at times to see through an otherwise linear pathway, but the camera rarely quirks during the action, and MadWorld's action, thankfully, is consitently amazing.
The presentation of Madworld is one of the game's many strong points. The game, with consistent attention to detail, and carrying a surprsingly vintage comic-book style, is one of the most unique looking games out on the market today. The voicework, completely hitting perfectly the moods registered in every cutscene, is solid work. Arguably, the strongest audio quality of MadWorld's presentation is it's fantastic soundtrack. The lyrics, containing humorous, biting satire, with an impressive vocal backing, is strongly remicent of the early and classic days of Insane Clown Posse. Thanks to a tight, strong multiplayer too, MadWorld's gameplay all together come round as increedibly entertaining.
Despite MadWorld suffers from considerably lazy level design, annoying camera, and the generally too brief gameplay, MadWorld is arguably the funnest and most creative Wii game of the year. MadWorld's consistent creativity, hilarious poltical incorrectness, and limitless entertainment is staggering. It may not completely overshadow the game's glaring weaknesses, but MadWorld is madness worth taking.