What's Black and White and Red All Over?
Written: Mar 16 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Visual style, creative idea, solid gameplay, fantastic voice acting and hysterical dialogue
Cons: A few control glitches, cumbersome camera
The Bottom Line: Madworld is both a celebration and spoof of violence and obscenity, and a fascinating addition to the Wii library. Its minor problems do little to dampen the fun.
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| onionhead2001's Full Review: MadWorld for Nintendo Wii |
Everybody knows the Wii is for kiddie games, right?
Apparently, Sega didn't get the memo. With the help of Platinum Games (made up of alumni from the brilliant Viewtiful Joe and Okami), they've released one of the most aggressively obscene titles in video game history, with full Wii-mote waggle control!
Madworld is an imperfect game, but it's the freshest thing to come from Sega since Jet Grind Radio, and the first game I've played in ages to rekindle the spirit of the Dreamcast era. It's daring. It's fun. It's everything Sega used to be before they collapsed into a pile of Sonic-branded dreck.
And despite its flaws, it's one of the best Wii games on the market.
The Set-Up:
You're Jack, a hulking brute with a retractable chainsaw mounted on your prosthetic right arm. You've just enrolled in the Deathwatch Games -- a reality gameshow in which contestants massacre each other for points. The more horrific the death, the more you score.
It isn't long before Jack's reason for entering the game comes into focus, but the basic idea should suffice for now... Jack has some serious killing to do.
Gameplay and Controls:
Older than old-school, Madworld is a reminder of the old days when points and lives mattered. It has the basic design philosophy of Final Fight -- run through the level, and take out the bad guys one at a time -- but shaken up for 2009. Instead of long corridors full of enemies, Madworld's levels are designed as arenas replete with various hazards that might come in handy for dismantling bodies.
You are set loose in each arena with 30 minutes to kill the boss. But since the boss won't come out and play until you've scored enough points, you'll have to fire up the chainsaw and get skull-cracking. At preset score intervals, additional bonuses will appear within the arena -- extra weapons, new environmental hazards, tougher enemies, and gruesome mini-games.
The fastest way to earn points is to be murderously creative. Sure... tossing that dude into a sawblade will get the job done. But what if you bound his arms with a tire, impaled his head with two streetsigns, and shoved some fireworks into his mouth first? Now you're thinking!
The mini-games involve similarly grotesque acts of mass homicide, launching enemies at a giant dartboard using a spiked bat, or tossing them into the vortex of a jet engine. These challenges help vary the action, and seem a sly bit of satire on a console renowned for insipid mini-game compilations.
The controls are simple, and make generally intelligent use of the Wii's motion-sensing remote. Basic attacks are managed with the A-button. The B-trigger fires up the chainsaw, and slashing the remote sends the blade ripping through foes. A quick jerk of the nunchuck activates a dodge, and the Z-trigger jumps. The controls don't require any elaborate use of the remote -- just basic horizontal and vertical swipes -- which minimizes (but does not eliminate) motion-sensing errors.
The use of motion controls could have been gimmicky if misapplied, but here adds to the visceral thrill of combat, and follows the No More Heroes template of using motion as punctuation rather than the main event. Against larger enemies and bosses, you'll occasionally find yourself in a cinematic power struggle that requires specific movements cued on-screen. The movements are well-synced with the action, and absolutely help to convey the force and brutality of Jack's attacks.
The game is a moderate challenge, largely due to its old-school values. You get your three lives to finish each stage. Lose them, and you'll have to start that stage from the beginning, which will frustrate players weaned on abundant checkpoints and unlimited lives. That said, the enemies don't put up much of a fight until the later levels, and the bosses are exciting but generally simple pattern-based affairs that shouldn't cause too much grief. Most capable players should be able to see the game's finish with minimal fuss.
Graphics and Presentation:
The Wii is simply not equipped to compete graphically with the high-definition power of the XBox 360 and PS3. The issue of primitive graphics is neatly sidestepped here with a fantastic monochrome style that evokes a graphic novel (comparisons with Sin City should abound). This team -- with Viewtiful Joe and Okami under their belt -- has a magnificent grasp of cel-shading, and uses a clever variation here that plays to the Wii's strengths. Forget technical specifications -- even at 480i (really, no progressive scan?) this game is a stunner.
The stark black-and-white is broken only by the guysers of bright red blood unleashed by Jack's mayhem. This serves the dual (and contradictory) purposes of emphasizing the violence while exposing it as ludicrous parody.
Sound is handled well, with the angry growl of a chainsaw and squishy blood spatter galore all set to a fitting rap soundtrack. But the real stand-out is the phenominal voice-acting. The main cast is excellent, and delivers convincing dialogue that puts most other video games to shame -- paritcularly impressive, considering the self-knowing absurdity of the material.
But even higher above and beyond the call of duty are the announcers... Greg Proops (Who's Line is it Anyway) and John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama and Fenix from Gears of War) are absolutely fantastic as the running commentary. Their dialogue is gleefully filthy, frequently descending to the deepest levels of crude sexual humor and obscenity. I have never heard things like this in any form of media, much less a Nintendo Wii game. The banter is so offensive -- so unabashedly vulgar -- that you have to laugh at its sheer audacity. The pair sound entirely comfortable with each other (half the material must be ad-libbed), and it would be easy to believe that they had been working together on DeathWatch for years.
Longevity:
Like the great beat-em-ups of yore, Madworld is a one-trick pony intended to be intensely fun for a short period of time (compare to Fallout 3 which is marginally entertaining for 50 hours). The game's longevity is what you make of it.
Hard-core players will enjoy revisiting the levels, striving for higher scores with more layered and brutal kills. Unfortunately, although each kill is graded on a scale from "routine" to "ulltimate," your total level score is not given any such treatment. There are, likewise, no online leaderboards to compete for bragging rights. So while advanced players may enjoy trying to ramp up the numbers, you can only really work on beating your personal best.
Some levels will be tagged with additional DeathWatch Challenges that ask the player to accomplish optional tasks while completing the stage. You might have to impale a larger enemy with five signposts, or collect a target number of souveneirs from downed enemies. These challenges are, again, for personal enjoyment only, and don't seem to have any greater purpose (that I've discovered, at any rate).
Upon completion, the game does hang two more carrots from the stick -- a hard mode is unlocked (which I haven't had the temerity to try), and two new extra weapons will appear in some of the stages.
The small pile of extras is nice, but for the most part, this game will only last for as long as you enjoy going back for more. For this player, I suspect that will be quite a while, but mileage may vary.
Problems?
Although a blast from start to finish, Madworld is not without its issues. I've suffered one fatal crash which required a system reboot, and there are several areas with shocking amounts of slowdown -- the likes of which I haven't seen since the 8-bit days. The second bike-racing level almost put my Wii into cardiac arrest. Minor nuisances, but worth mentioning.
Although the controls are thoughtfully designed, I did have a good amount of trouble consistently getting the game to recognize the difference between a vertical swipe of the remote and a horizontal one. In most cases, this was a minor problem, but during some "power struggle" moments, it made the difference between life and death. Some kind of calibration mechanism might have been nice to help account for individual differences in controller movement.
And the camera is a frequent annoyance, insisting for the most part on a rigid behind-the-back vantage that often obstructs your view of the action and makes it harder to find enemies. The camera is also easily distracted by minor cutscenes (which occur with several types of kills), and you will often flash back into the game facing a different direction than the one you started in. I wonder if the action would have been better served with a bird's eye camera with close-ups for impact.
The game provides a lock-on mechanism to help combat the problem, but it is poorly implemented (if not overtly broken), requiring a sustained press of the C-button to toggle on and off (a concession presumably made because your trigger finger is already busy with jumping). With multiple enemies on the screen, it is hard to predict who will be locked, and with one enenmy on the screen, the lock will sometimes inexplicably fail to activate at all. It works fine for boss battles once you can get it turned on, but will frequently be canceled at seemingly random moments, forcing you to re-align and set it again. I really can't explain why it works so poorly -- this shouldn't have been much of a design challenge for such an otherwise accomplished team.
For the Parents:
If it isn't clear from this review, Madworld is not for children, and goes out of its way to score a Mature (17+) rating. Apart from encouraging completely gratuitious violence and spilling enough digital blood to fill a small lake, the dialogue is monumentally offensive. It's not just fart jokes -- the announcers are joyfully disturbed, and frequently misogynistic as they make crude remarks about female enemies, and even each others' wives. It's all tongue-in-cheek, and arguably intended as a legitimate spoof, but it ironically takes an audience of some maturity to process this level of immaturity. Parents -- do your job, and keep this game out of your kids' hands.
Wrap-Up:
It's hard not to be reminded of the Dreamcast days when playing Madworld, with misty-eyed memories of the Sega that used to be. Like the games of that era, Madworld impresses with a unique and creative premise married to unforgettable style, and offers something genuinely new in a landscape of clones and sequels. Unfortunately, like those seminal games, players are often required to put up with design oversights like awkward controls and dubious camerawork in order to appreciate the gem within.
Wii owners looking for some family-unfriendly fare should find much to celebrate in Madworld which, warts and all, easily earns a place among my favorite video games of this generation. Happy slashing!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
onionhead2001
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Location: Charlottesville, VA 22901
Reviews written: 65
Trusted by: 9 members
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