Viewtifully visceral violence
Format: Wii Dev: Platinum Games Pub: Sega Out: 20/03/09 Players: 1
MadWorld, an inventive third-person action game exclusively for Wii, this is definitely snuff video gaming at its highpoint; the latest in a short but controversial line of games about a character killing other characters in gruesome ways for the viewing pleasure of an in-game television audience.
You enter the game as Jack – ‘Just Jack’, the newest participant in Varrigan City’s killing games, affectionately termed ‘Death Watch’. From the outset this ‘mad world’ of a game show narrative may remind you of a far grislier version of SmashTV, but as you move further into the narrative some curious twists do appear. This curiosity, grittiness and horror is further characterised through MadWorld’s graphic novel looks. Aside from the copious spurts of red blood (or blue alien goo) and the odd splash of yellow comic book onomatopoeia, everything is rendered in black and white, and for a while it’s hard not to be awed by this unusual presentation. It is understandable that such a style of gaming will come at the expense of optical clarity and ease, and over a short spell it does become progressively more difficult to distinguish between objects of use and the gaming backdrop. Therefore this game is best played in short chunks, if only because you’ll need both visual and emotional relief from time to time.
Fortunately, Platinum Games have taken into consideration that overkill is best experienced in small bite-size portions and have placed time limits on levels overflowing with horrific and lethal devices. ShockTV viewers are a hungry audience and you’ll discover that earning points is not only determined by how many opponents you kill, but most importantly how violently you choose to do so. As ‘Just Jack’ you could simply impale a foe on a wall of spikes over and over until copious spurts of red blood fill the screen, which may sound savage enough, but this won’t earn you as many points as shoving a tyre over their head, piercing them with a traffic sign and then using a spiked baseball bat to launch them onto the wall of spikes over and over again – brutal, eh?
In moderation to all of this killing a constant stream of humour is also provided in the voices of Greg Proops (Whose Line Is It Anyway?) and John DiMaggio (‘Bender’ from Futurama). Little of it is fit to print, but it is laced with some F-bombs and MF-bombs, with banter going back and forth and you often go red-faced with laughter or experience the occasional blush from the witty and profane remarks. A twenty track hip hop soundtrack does compliment both the chatter and the gameplay, and the crunching and squelching noises apparent from in-game are almost as gruesome as the sights.
From everything I experienced, the game’s control scheme does utilise the Wii’s capabilities well, offering a balanced use of button-bashing as well as the signature remote waving which simulates the on-screen action in a variety of finishing moves, ranging from swinging your victim around to cutting through enemies with a chainsaw. As such, you’ll be swinging the Wii Remote around your head to throw enemies into jet engines, or pulling the Wii Remote and Nunchuk apart from one another to break a grunt’s neck. There’s a lot going on but the action is never anything but instinctive. The design of the game does promote a few camera troubles which can lead to slight disorientation. Occasionally this can mean grabbing thin air instead of that traffic sign that you wanted to plunge into your enemies torso, which can be frustrating and although the game is designed with a lock-on feature (designed to alleviate this problem) it doesn’t always work when needed, particularly in boss battles, when it would really have come in handy.
There are mini-games available, but not what you’re used to seeing on the Wii. These brutal bits provide some of the game’s most explicit imagery, and many of them are funny in a grisly way. Throwing enemies into a giant hand, which then squeezes blood from their bodies as if juicing an orange and sticking your targets in barrels that then launch into the air, creating a bloody fireworks display are just some violent examples, however, most of these are enjoyable for the limited time in which they occur. You can revisit them with a friend in a split-screen multiplayer mode in which you compete for high scores, but out of context, these challenges are far less enjoyable and pretty tedious after one or two attempts.
In short, although MadWorld does have its inconsistencies it does provide that much needed rush of blood to the head for adrenaline junkies almost as often as it provides a rush of blood to the floor. MadWorld is what hardcore gamers and adults want for the Wii.
Nadya Jaworskyi
[Originally published on Monday, 20 April 2009]
Tags: beat-em-up, fighting, madworld, sega
