MadWorld Hands-on Preview

All of a sudden the Wii is turning into a games console that’s a little less party machine and a little more harbinger of blood-soaked death. We’re used to family-friendly loveliness from Nintendo’s motion-sensing wonder. We’re not used to gore so violent it makes a movie I saw recently, called Zombie Strippers, in which an undead woman bites off the testicles of an unfortunate bloke before turning to the camera and crunching them with her teeth, look like a Pixar movie.

Like House of the Dead: Overkill before it (which has, by a country mile, the most shocking ending to a game I have ever seen), MadWorld, also published by SEGA, one of the few publishers willing to take risks on the Wii, contains such over the top violence that it’s impossible to find it offensive. Or shocking. Or disgusting. Or any other emotion that might get the Daily Mail’s knickers in a twist.

Instead, MadWorld, part one of Japanese developer PlatinumGames’ three-game deal with SEGA (which includes the upcoming Bayonetta and Infinite Space), is more likely to make you laugh. MadWorld’s violence is so stylised that you just can’t take it seriously. The entire game, from plot to graphics to sound, is fully aware of this fact, and makes the most of it.

MadWorld’s premise is clearly inspired by sci-fi Schwarzenegger movie/Stephen King novel The Running Man. Varrigan City has been overrun by thugs and is now nothing more than a war zone. The place has been cut off – there are no bridges out, no tunnels in – and no police. Sounds pretty boring, right? No wonder Deathwatch, a brutal bloodsport, has evolved to keep everyone entertained.

You play Jack, who has entered himself into the competition. XIII is a representative of a mysterious company that wants to sponsor Jack’s blood-soaked adventures, and acts as Jack’s guide, a wizard-type voice screaming instructions in his ear. That’s pretty much it. It’s not deep, it’s not particularly meaningful, but it doesn’t matter.

MadWorld’s aesthetic borrows from an equally visceral piece of popular culture. The game is coloured entirely in black and white, except for the blood. Remind you of anything? Frank Miller’s film noir comic/film Sin City perhaps? Good. So it should. The game looks strikingly similar.

Which isn’t a slight. In fact, MadWorld is perhaps the Wii’s most graphically striking game yet. The thick red blood stands out like a beaming sun against a pale blue sky. When Jack tears someone in half and blood sprays out in every direction, you can almost feel it splashing against your face. And those worried about picking out Jack, his enemies and other objects against the black and white background need not. At first there is a degree of adjustment, but after about 10 minutes of play your eyes and brain adjust to the depth of field in place and you have no problem telling Jack from that ominous wall of spikes so conveniently placed over yonder.

The opening chapter sets Jack a single target – Little Eddie, who acts as the end of level boss. To get to him, though, you need to get 16 million points. Points scoring, really, is what MadWorld is all about.

When you first play MadWorld you’re struck by how simple and responsive the controls feel, a pleasant surprise when you consider how frustrating the controls are with many Wii games. Jack’s movement is controlled with the Nunchuck thumb stick. He can grab objects and enemies with the A button, then flick the Nunchuck for a head butt or flick the Wii Remote to hurl them in a forward direction. Basic attacks are based on taps of the A and B buttons and movement of the Wii Remote: swing it from left to right and Jack will back fist his enemy. Hold B down, though, and he will rev his chainsaw, allowing you to carve thugs up into little pieces.

At points in combat you’ll have the opportunity to do a gruesome finisher. The game will prompt you to press A or B in these situations in a quick time event fashion. The finishers are context sensitive, and depend on how you’re killing your enemy. If you’re using the chainsaw you might tear your enemy in half. If you’re simply punching then it might involve a bone-crunching neck snap.

At first, simply using the chainsaw to decimate the slow moving, brain-dead enemies and doing the odd finisher is enough to satisfy. But it soon becomes apparent that the points you get from these sorts of kills aren’t anywhere near enough to get the 16 million you need to unlock the boss fight with Little Eddie. In order to do that, you’re going to have to use your head, and not just for skull-crushing head butts.

You need to you use the environment to your advantage. Sure you can punch an enemy into oblivion, even chainsaw them in half, but you won’t get anywhere near as many points for doing that as you would for crushing them in a dumpster. You get 6000 points for picking up a tire and trapping an enemy with it in true cartoon fashion. You get 20,000 points for tearing a signpost from the ground and sticking it into the neck of the same bad guy. You could just leave him to hilariously wander about like a zombie at that point, with the pole still stuck in his neck and the tire still tightly wrapped around his abdomen, but, if you were so inclined, you could pick him up and repeatedly impale him on a wall of spikes. Each impale nails 5000 points.

Or you could stuff them in a burning barrel – 30,000 points. Or you could chuck them into a garbage can and close the lid to split them in half. Every level, every piece of virtual scenery in MadWorld has been designed to help you kill, kill and then kill some more in increasingly violent ways.

Dotted about the environments are Bloodbath Challenges. Some of these mini-games you might have already heard about – Man Darts is a popular one, but the first one you’ll come across is Turbinator. Here you need to grab and chuck into an aeroplane turbine as many enemies as you can within a set time limit. You could throw them in one by one, but what you really want to do is line them up so that one thrown enemy smacks into a another, and smacks into another, sending them all spiralling into the flesh tearing blades. It’s here that you’ll discover the different levels of violence that can be achieved in MadWorld, from routine to hardcore to super to extreme to ultimate.

When you arrive at Varrigan Station you notice the enemies get a little harder to kill. Before, they would amble about like brainless dolts. Now they actually have a go at you, and fight back when you grab them. But the potential for crazy kills is even bigger, to make up for it. Speeding trains regularly hurtle through the station, providing ample opportunity to, say, ring enemies with bins and whatnot and chuck them onto the tracks. There’s another Bloodbath Challenge here – Rocket Reamer. The idea is that you grab bags of cash and throw them on the tracks. The green attracts the greedy bad buys like flies to poo. Then you hear an approaching train, complete with spikes on the front. Then it comes. Then they’re all very, very dead.

With your 16 million points accumulated, the Little Eddie boss fight is unlocked. Predictably, Little Eddie isn’t little at all. He’s massive, actually, a giant thug reminiscent of the cave troll from the first Lord of the Rings film. The fight isn’t hard, indeed much of what I’ve seen of MadWorld isn’t hard. It’s designed not to frustrate with endless death, or even require much skill. When you die you simply respawn, with the damage you’ve done to enemies intact. Eventually, you wear Little Eddie down, and use his own ball and chain against him in a brutal finishing move.

At its most basic MadWorld is a fun, violent third-person action game spliced with a points system that rewards depraved thinking. But the more you play the more you come to realise that it isn’t so easily shoehorned. As your mind begins to survey each environment, picking out areas with generous point-giving potential, as you develop killing strategies with getting the maximum score in the quickest time possible in mind, as your blood-soaked experimentation starts to open up new avenues of destruction, you start to realise that MadWorld might be more of a puzzle game.

The concern right now is that the stylised gore will divert attention away from any gameplay deficiencies the game might have. My brief hands-on session with the game was undoubtedly fun, but will MadWorld remain so compelling throughout its duration? It’s impossible to know at this point. The combat isn’t particularly complicated, the game doesn’t require skill in the way a Devil May Cry or God Hand (Madword is being developed by some of the guys and girls who made the excellent God Hand on PS2) does, and it’s not punishing in the slightest. These observations aren’t meant to be criticisms, just… observations.

And MadWorld’s violence can only last so long before you start to get used to it, before it starts to go by almost unnoticed. When this happens the game will live or die by the quality of the gameplay, by the level design, by how rewarding it is after working out how you’re going to use the environment to score the maximum number of points from any given enemy for the hundredth time, and by how many different ways you’re able to do it. As it stands, MadWorld’s violence looks the business. Fingers crossed the gameplay matches it.

MadWorld is due out exclusively on the Wii on March 20.