MadWorld

Red, white, and black. Those are the three colors you will see when playing MadWorld. Red being all the blood and guts you're going to spill while playing this game. No, there aren't actually guts, because this is a Wii game, and the blood doesn't look like blood at all, which, if the game was on an HD console you would probably be shouting and hooting even more and the hilariously violent, but extremely unlikely, sins you commit as the main protagonist, Jack. Jack, a brutal badass motherf*cker without a conscience (voices by the amazing Steven Blum), has found himself trapped in Varrigan City, with all bridges connecting the city to other towns gone , they've been destroyed. Now, Jack has to fight his way to the top of the Death Watch rankings so he can get a free pass to freedom. Oh, and $100,000,000. In order to do so, he has to be the last person alive on the island. And he will stop and nothing to claim his prize.

This is the kind of game the Jack Thom pson's of the world despise. Even though it may be completely unrealistic (come on, is this gonna push a kid overboard and make him impale a street sign in someones face?), parents everywhere will not want their kids playing it. The game is very stylized. You'll get that graphics novel feeling with it. When you hit some one with a weapon you get an onomatopoeia of that sound. During the cutscenes, you won't see to many moving mouths, but rather Mega Man X style cutscenes with still character boxes showing up on the screen. No, it's not at all text based though, but you're trainer can get annoying because of his stupid text boxes that stay up for longer tha n they should.

One of the games strongest points is all the weapons you can wield. You always have a chainsaw at you're disposal. Along with that, you can pick up street signs, trash cans, car tires, lamp posts, dynamite, soda bottles (yes, soda bottles) and many, many, many more things that are lying around. With these, you can walk up to enemies and slam them into their face. If you would like, after that, you could pick them up and throw them into a dumpster, amputating all of their upper body. Maybe you want to put them on a catapult and send them flying to the moon. You could possibly want to bash their face against a gong.  Or, you could jam their back into spikes that are sticking out of a train, or you could just simply chainsaw them in half, vertically, or horizontally, not that the Wiimote can detect which way to do it or anything. There are the one time use weapons that you can just jam into people faces, but you can also pick up permanent weapons (atleast for that level). These weapons include spiked baseball bats, golf clubs, duel wieldable daggers, speers, and many others. These weapons control just like the chainsaw, hold B down, and swing your Wiimote. Most of the weapons have a special abili ty. With daggers you can pretty much do a whirlwind and spin around in circles clearing out everyone in your path. With the spear you can make, well, a human-kabob.

The way you use these weapons is very important. Now, the game is very arcadey, and utilizing all your weapons and surroundings will earn you masny points. Now the game is very arcadey, and pretty much open world too, to an extent. By open world I mean open level I guess, once you complete a level you can't just wander back to where you were before without selecting that level. It's so arcadey is has lives, continues, a time limit, and most importantly points. And, yes, I did say lives, meaning you'll have to restart a whole long ass level if you lose all of them. This can be very annoying. It takes all the pleasure and fun out of the game the second time through a level, since your just seeing the same animations over and over again.

Now back to the points. This is how most of the MadWorld levels work. You'll be dropped into a big area, the areas range from a train station, to an Asian town, to a zombie infested house. This big huge area is your playground. Your playground to earn as many points as possible, as fast as possible. As you earn more points, you'll earn more rewards, and oppurtunities. At the beginni ng of each level it will give you a list of all the point goals you're aiming for, and what you'll get for them. Some of them can just be a simple 1-up. Others could be a special weapon to have fun with, others could be Blood Bath Chall enges, and the last point amount you're aiming for will open the boss fight. Aside from a rare motorcycle mission here and there, this is pretty much how all of the levels work.

The Blood Bath Challenges I mentioned are basically mini games where you try to earn as many points as possible and kill as many people as you can. Now, you have to kill them like the Black Baron, the guy who introduces you into all of these awesome challenges, wants you to. Just chainsawing people won't get you any points. The challenges range from throwing people into the path of an oncoming train, hitting people with a bat to try to score a bullseye in darts, shaking up soda bottles and throwing them in people's throats, sending them flying as far as you can, to a huge spinning turbine that you can throw all of your enemies at. All of these Blood Bath Challenges can indeed be played with a friend, as I might add. But no leader boards or online play.

The boss fights are okay. Once you get enough points to unlock them, they'll become open and you'll have to activate them on your own, so you can run around and have fun as much as you want, just watch out for that time limit. The actual fights themselves  pretty much work like fighting any other enemy in the game, except they have way more life, and you'll get a quick time event during the fight occasionally. Really, the coolest thing about the boss fights is the quick time events you get at the end. There pretty brutal, and will actually make you feel sorry for what you just did to your fellow Death Watch contestants.

Final Decision
The first time you put this game in your going to have a blast. You're going to think it's awesome. The first time you put a tire on a guys head,  jam a street sign into his face, and proceed that with a wicked chainsaw slice, it's pretty much priceless. The problem is, it gets old, quickly. Maybe not to the younger generation of gamers, the violence is probably always hilarious, but even with the wide variations of kills, weapons, and enemies the games point based system just doesn't do the longevity of the game a favor. There's nothing worse than getting to the final boss fight of a level and losing all your lives, only to have to go through the whole level all over again. MadWorld's ultra-violent-sick-and-twisted gameplay, at first, is very fun (and funny), but after awhile it just becomes stale and it's not really something you're gonna wanna pick up off your shelf after it's been sitting there for awhile. The production values are good, but the game just doesn't hold up for long, so I suggest you rent this one.