MadWorld

MadWorld is one of the most distinctive games ever released on Wii, largely thanks to its look. The entire world is rendered in stark black-and-white artwork resembling a comic drawn with a heavy brush, and the only colour that appears in it is blood. The story takes the player to Varrigan City, a town cut off from the outside world and turned into the arena for a deadly television show called DeathWatch. Jack Cayman enters it with a chainsaw grafted onto his forearm and the task of fighting his way up the leaderboard of competitors to the top.

The combat isn't about ordinary brawling. The game rewards creativity: enemies can be impaled on road signs, thrown into spinning turbines, under a passing train or into the hands of giant helpers, and the longer and more bizarre the chain of actions the player pulls off, the more points they earn. It's that score which opens up further progress, turning the game into a competition of improvisation and of finding out just how much the environment will allow. The controls use Wii Remote motions both to rev up the chainsaw and for the finishing executions, while minigames parodying television game-show formats appear between levels.

The atmosphere is held together largely by the sound. A pair of announcers comments on the fights, their cynical one-liners feeling like part of the broadcast and never growing stale, and the soundtrack leans on gritty hip hop that suits the fast pace perfectly. The game is short, completable within a few evenings, yet it's dense from start to finish with no dead spots. At the time, reviewers praised its visual boldness and energy while criticizing the lesser variety of the later rounds. Commercially it didn't do especially well, yet most players rank it among the most interesting titles in the entire Wii library and as proof that the console could handle uncompromising, adult-oriented action games too. It's also worth noting that the game was made while developer PlatinumGames was still building its name, and many ideas from its combat system later resurfaced in its far more famous titles. For Wii owners, it remains one of the few ways to play merciless action on the console.