MadWorld

Feedback is crucial. Since MadWorld is a score attack, it's imperative you know you're performing to standard. Enemies replenish infinitely, Boss encounters only available when a specific score is posted, so it's up to the production to inform. And inform it does. Cataclysm rends cause joy buzz burps to spew out the Wii Remote mini-speaker, unending blood thunders out of traumatised foes, and the constant chatter of the commentators gets ever more agitated and scatological. That's how you know you're achieving.

Even MadWorld's loading screens illuminate mechanic, simplistic anti-safety vignettes that warn the user that escalation is everything if they want to rack up crucial points. Lancing ornamental light fixtures through a dizzy opponents neck isn't cutting it, you need to trash-can him too, before lugging the skewered monstrosity over to some wall-mounted spikes for further indignity. Even then that's rated as Routine Violence by the in-game combo counter. You have to be inventive, aware of every use folded into your surroundings, and how best to exploit them. Can I smash that antique painting over their heads? What if I shake up this champagne bottle and drive it into their face? In this sense, MadWorld is reminiscent of Capcom's mostly overlooked 2005 gladiatorial gem Shadow of Rome. Like MadWorld, Shadow of Rome wasn't especially concerned with elimination by quantity, but rather quality. Your goal wasn't to satisfy a quota, it was to satisfy your audience. They wanted carnage. Methodically dispatch your foes, and they'd get bored and indifferent. Actively torture and humiliate everything you face and there would be standing ovations.

MadWorld is the first release from Platinum Games, an independent company made up of ex-Clover staff, with a Sega publishing deal. It is a bold opening statement, most immediately in terms of visual grammar. MadWorld isn't just black and white, it has a slightly yellowed brown wash over everything, presumably to better pattern itself after the low quality paper of the cult clash comics it venerates. Much has been made of the game's resemblance to Frank Miller's Sin City series, the stark monochrome hyper-violence with blood-red accents especially, there's more though. Player character Jack has the silhouette of Dark Horse stable-mate Hellboy; goggles instead of filed down hell-horns, and a mechanical motor-doom hand. Jack and the post-apocalyptic landscape he inhabits recalls Go Nagai's punishment parable Violence Jack, both heroes ultimately empty lug-men who crave hideous slaughter. Most especially though there's Takajo and Tetsuya's Riki-Oh, in which a psychotic blank-man of indeterminate origin lays waste to an avalanche of pulp archetypes. Ninjas. Reich Dictators. Robots. Oh my!

As a piece of reconstituted pop culture, MadWorld is immensely satisfying. As a game though, it falters occasionally: there's a massive shelf-bait difficulty spike in the middle portion that'll have players scratching their heads. Equally baffling is the decision to limit lives and remove continues. If you scrape through the challenge section but fluff the boss, you're dumped back at the map screen, progress ignored. Given MadWorld's brevity, it's a logical decision on the gamemaker's part to eke out some artificial length, but it's not much fun to have to repeat a lengthy score-rush only to face a titanic boss you still haven't worked out a strategy for. Motion lunges are also occasionally fuzzy, with appropriate hand-slashes sometimes deemed inadequate. They're the exception though, for the most part the Wii Remote swipes and jabs littered throughout Boss matches are wittily implemented, inspiring near hysterical exertion. It's a layer of immersive interactivity that simply does not exist on any other platform. Tapping a button to make your on-screen action figure in Resident Evil 5 outpace a monster simply isn't as satisfying as physically mimicking flailing arm pumps. When MadWorld was first revealed there was real skepticism that a satisfying third person action game could be achieved on the Wii. We needn't have worried.