MadWorld Hands On

You bludgeon all sorts of Sin-City-meets-Manhunt badguys with your fists and whatever else is around, throwing them into bizarre death traps wherever you can find them. MadWorld’s carnival freak aggressors don’t put up much of a fight though, and therein lies the problem. I’m a glutton for exaggerated cartoon violence in videogames. MadWorld’s is very satisfying, a perfect mix of funny and grotesque, as a visual spectacle, but it never demands anything of you as a game. If there’s no threat to your own well-being in a game like MadWorld, the violence loses the thrill of tension and release. It’s that exact balance that made the Platinum Games team’s other action games God Hand and Viewtiful Joe the so memorable.

MadWorld’s presentation — intricate black and white environments and characters accented by washes of red blood and yellow sound-effect words — looks great, bellying the Wii’s meager horsepower. The characters are huge too, much bigger than you usually see in the genre, and the camera stays close to the action. The characters are so big though that I found myself losing track of what was even happening. If the enemies were even remotely aggressive, I think I would have died more than a few times. The black and white compounds the confusion because it’s hard to discern what’s what on screen – if the game didn’t have a GTA-style radar as part of its HUD, I wouldn’t have even realized there was a path leading to the level’s objective. Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba admitted to the inherent problems of MadWorld’s visual style, and it was troubling to find that all the kinks hadn’t been worked out yet.

[nerve.com]

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