Picked up MadWorld this weekend, and I have to say that I'm somewhat underwhelmed. The game does many things right, but I feel that for every step forward, the game takes a few steps back.


Things I liked

• The art style and character design are great. The Sin City-esque art style is an excellent way to get around the technical limitations of the Wii.
  
• So much violence. Seeing guys get chopped in half by closing dumpster lids, tossed in meat grinders, or halved with a chainsaw, is pretty awesome.
  

• The soundtrack is excellent, and oddly fits the game perfectly. On the default setting it's hard to hear the commentary though.
• Man Golf. This is by far the best Bloodbath Challenge.
  

• The camera is terrible. I've read some reviews that referred to it as problematic, but that's giving it too much credit. The camera can't be rotated around Jack, it can only be centered behind him using the C button, and it follows way to closely. Holding down the C button will lock-on to an enemy, but outside of boss fights, it's pretty useless. Sometimes it doesn't even work, forcing you to repeatedly hold down the C button to get a lock on an enemy.
• The commentary(done by Greg Proops and John DiMaggio) is humorous at first, but takes less than an hour before getting stale. Expect to hear about how health pills are better when crushed up and injected into the folds of your scrotum every couple of minutes. This could have easily been remedied by not having comments played after every single goddammed thing you do. Every time you shove a street sign through a guy's neck, they will comment on it, and with a small bank of comments about impaling a guy, you will hear the same ones over and over, and it really started to get on my nerves.
  
• Quick Time Events. I'm ready for these to go away. Forever. QTE's take a lot of punch out of the boss fights in MadWorld. Almost every boss fight in the game boils down to waiting until you get a prompt for the boss' QTE, waggling your Wiimote along with the screen, rinse, repeat.
  
• The motorcycle sections suck. plain and simple. The only good part about them is that they don't last very long.
• Most of the Bloodbath Challenges invole nothing more than grouping guys together, and throwing one into the group, and knocking them all into a Jet Engine, the Death Press, a giant hand, etc.
  
• Lack of co-op story mode. I'm not one of those people that complains anytime a game doesn't have co-op. I'm a firm believer of the single-player experiences that games can provide. But co-op is a staple of the beat-em-up genre. And to put in co-op support just for the Bloodbath Challenge mini-games is just not cutting it. This game's replayability could have been exponentially increased with the ability to play with a friend.