Daily Loaf

New release Madworld for the Nintendo Wii: It’s Sin City meets The Running Man meets Escape From New York. What more do you need to know? Well, you should probably know it’s actually just kind of mediocre and occasionally dull, more like The Spirit meets The 6th Day meets Escape From L.A.

Anyway, Madworld is a blood-soaked, profanity-laden, super stylish action game for everybody’s favorite family-friendly game console.

Before I got my hands on it, I hadn’t turned on my Wii in months — not since Wii Fit came out, and that exercise program only lasted a week or so. As many have lamented, no one’s really making much in the way of hard core or cool games for the Wii these days – it’s mostly just shovel ware for kids with the occasional gem from Nintendo. The cool games that do come out on Wii, like Rock Band, have better versions on the more powerful consoles, so why buy them? But developers are starting to expand their horizons, and Sega brings us this bloody romp that’ll have you flipping your wrists to cut dudes in half with a chain saw, ram sign posts through their skulls and slam them into spikes over and over again.

Madworld has mad style. It’s all black and white, comic-book-style art — very reminiscent of Sin City. This style serves double duty – adding real visual flair and interest to the game while at the same time hiding the Wii’s lesser graphical prowess. The only color is red (well, a little yellow too), and almost all of that red is blood. And there’s lots and lots of blood. Overall, I have nothing but praise for the game’s visuals, and I think it’s worth a look for that alone.

I award more style points for the storytelling, too. Here’s the set-up (without giving away any spoilers): A city much like New York has been sealed off from the rest of the country and is now turned into an island of killers competing in a televised blood sport where to goal is to kill each other in the most gruesome manner possible to win points. You play as Jack, a new contestant in the city who may have more of an agenda than he’s letting on. He’s definitely got a chainsaw strapped to his right arm that he can pop out like Wolverine’s claws.

Each level consists of Jack running around and smashing/slicing/tossing punks as he wracks up points. There are various environmental kills which you activate by picking a dude up and throwing him into something. My favorite is the fish tank full of piranhas on the zombie level. Yes, there’s a zombie level (a series of them in fact, which I thought was kind of out of place, but they’re well-executed). The action is mindless fun, and when you pick up new weapons things spice up a little. I loved the spear that you could skewer multiple enemies with and then fling them all off at once. But mostly it’s just more and more of the same, with only slight variations each level.

The boss fights are the weakest, most frustrating parts of the game. While each boss is interesting, the system for beating them blows. You avoid their nasty attacks and get in some licks of your own, but the main way to beat them is to trigger a quick time event where you have to wiggle the Wii-mote at just the right time. It usually takes about three such events to beat the boss. How do you trigger these events? I have no idea. No way that I could predict anyway – it would just happen, seemingly at random. And each time it did happen I was treated to the same canned animation again – the exact same thing, which was clever or funny or cool the first time, but which was just silly repeated multiple times.

Speaking of repetition, there’s a humorous, profanity-laden play by play and color commentary going on the entire time you’re fighting in each level. There’s some pretty amusing stuff that gets thrown around here, and like all the voice acting in the game, it’s quite well done. But it also gets quite repetitive. And the thing is, the quips are often funny little anecdotes or jokes that work once but then just sound stupid repeated over and over again in the same level. The repetition turns one of the game’s potential strong points into an annoyance.

Ultimately Madworld looks and sounds and plays great, but lacks any pleasing depth. I started out entranced by it’s gratuitous gore and seductive violence, but it all started to wear thin upon repeated exposure until I just felt like I was slogging through. The story works well, and it’s well written and wry, but most of what you do is not story-driven. Rent it, see what you think. Maybe pick it up used or if you’re really intrigued by its style and look. Beyond those two things, there’s not enough to Madworld.

Posted in Tech | Leave a comment