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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, MadWorld is a sad sad attempt by Sega to make a really "edgy" and "mature" game by throwing around a lot of excessive gore and swearing, ending up with just a juvenile desperate plea for attention.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Over the top violence and swearing is in there, but it's all in the name of humor. More significantly, there is a pretentious espionage and conspiracy plot exposited through cut scenes between levels which falls flat, feeling very clearly like it was tacked on as an afterthought with no real connection to the game.
Why I Like It Anyway: As seems to be a growing trend in the industry, Mad World is a game whose success was completely sabotaged by a misleading ad campaign. While it was promoted as the sort of grim and gritty, dark brooding game described above (with particular emphasis being placed on the hiring of Final Fantasy Tactics' Yasumi Matsuno to write the aforementioned tacked-on story), the actual game is about as far removed from that as one can possibly get. In actuality, it is an absolutely over the top silly romp of intentionally absurd violence and general insanity. The whole affair is thinly rationalized as an anything goes death sport, along the lines of Smash TV or The Running Man, but even that much grounding gets thrown out the window in short order.
What really makes the game is the commentators. With the exception of the incongruously serious plot scenes (which can be skipped over without impacting the narrative flow of the game proper), the entirety of the game, up to and including the end credits, features a constant running commentary by John DiMaggio (Futurama's Bender), and Greg Proops (likely best known as the Buddy Holly looking guy from Whose Line is it Anyway?). As anyone who has ever listened to a commentary track on a Futurama DVD and seen Greg Proops perform can tell you, these two are darn good at this sort of thing, and they have something to say about everything. Grab a power-up? They have a joke to make about it. Smash a crate? They'll chime in. Kill something in a really amusing fashion? It'll get a mention. Just repeat the same thing over and over? They'll pick on you for it. It's the closest thing you're ever going to see to a videogame getting the MST3k treatment.
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One would figure that amusing or not, this sort of thing would wear out its welcome fast, because even with a decent selection of different lines to choose from in any given situation, they will all be repeated far too often. Aside from the impact of the quality and variety, this rarely becomes an issue however, as MadWorld is the first release from Platinum Games. Platinum Games of course being comprised primarily of Capcom's former Clover Studio, as has been mentioned here before. As such, MadWorld, even more so than their previous titles, is all about encouraging variety in the player's actions. While a game like Viewtiful Joe rewards stylish combos with experience points, MadWorld has an arcade game mentality, with progress only made possible by accruing certain totals of style points within what are honestly profoundly generous time limits.
This means that literally the entire point of the game is to amass these points by way of killing people in the most stylish, unique, and elaborate ways you can think of. When feeling uninspired, you can simply play the game like a brawler, punching people or picking up weapons to dispatch them with. In a hurry, you have a wrist mounted chainsaw good for a one hit kill on most enemies too, but unless you're going by sheer volume, those won't amount to much. The example given in the opening tutorial of how to do things properly urges the player to pin a mook's arms down with a reinforced tire, shish kebab him with a signpost (warning of the danger of being stabbed with signposts amusingly enough), pick him up, carry him over to a spike covered wall, and slam him into it several times. That's on the mundane side of things. Later areas provide opportunities to shake up soda bottles, shove them into people's mouths, and launch them soaring into the sky from the force of the escaping foam, knock zombies onto a catapult which then flings them to visibly impact on the surface of the moon, and throw novelty pirate hats onto gigantic grills, luring scores of ninjas to their death as they attack these hats, solely based on the internet meme of ninjas considering pirates to be their mortal enemy. And yes, you do get more points if you stuff those zombies into barrels and impale them with giant pitchforks before catapulting them into the moon. Then Bender makes a nerdy catapult joke.
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Again, this sort of wacky fun is not at all what this game this was advertised to contain. This becomes particularly baffling in the face of MadWorld being exclusive to the Wii. A system for which the world at large generally agrees the grim dark serious bloodthirsty crowd is a significant demographic. The pretense of dark gritty seriousness on the other hand does tie into the one thing MadWorld bases itself on besides hilarious ultra-violence. Being a loving spoof of Sin City.
Aside from the dismemberment, the main character's design and demeanor are about as blatantly based on Sin City's Marv as you can get. More important than that though, the game does an amazing job of replicating the extremely distinct strictly-black-and-white look of the original graphic novels. These screenshots give some idea, but to see this visual style in motion is extremely impressive, both aesthetically, and on a technical level as characters move in and out of shadows. Of course, as a non to Sin City's periodic use of a single color, blood is always in full color, making the game as a whole an alternate punch line to the terrible joke- What's black and white and red all over?
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It also bears some mention that, as a Wii game, MadWorld of course has it's share of Wiimote gimmickry. At various points, on screen prompts will suddenly appear urging the player to yank the controller in some fashion or other to execute special attacks, usually finishing moves or unique devastating attacks against particular bosses. While not as charming as the wheelchair section from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, it does lend a certain charm to lopping off limbs and snapping necks when forced to roughly mimic the action yourself.
The one drawback to the game is that it is a little on the short side, but this lends itself nicely to the overall arcade nature, encouraging one to replay levels, trying to beat their previous score, or see just how many enemies they can knock into the same spike lined dumpster at a time. Of particular replayability are a series of minigames, introduced by a cross-the-line-twice take on blaxploitation films who is traditionally killed by his assistant just after explaining such goals as seeing how many people you can throw into a jet engine, or knock into a distant target with a baseball bat within a certain period of time.
