New release Madworld for the Nintendo Wii: It's Sin City meets The Running Man meets Escape From New York. What more do you need to know? Well, you should probably know it's actually just kind of mediocre and occasionally dull, more like The Spirit meets The 6th Day meets Escape From L.A.
Anyway, Madworld is a blood-soaked, profanity-laden, super stylish action game for everybody's favorite family-friendly game console.
Before I got my hands on it, I hadn't turned on my Wii in months — not since Wii Fit came out, and that exercise program only lasted a week or so. As many have lamented, no one's really making much in the way of hard core or cool games for the Wii these days – it's mostly just shovel ware for kids with the occasional gem from Nintendo. The cool games that do come out on Wii, like Rock Band, have better versions on the more powerful consoles, so why buy them? But developers are starting to expand their horizons, and Sega brings us this bloody romp that'll have you flipping your wrists to cut dudes in half with a chain saw, ram sign posts through their skulls and slam them into spikes over and over again.
Madworld has mad style. It's all black and white, comic-book-style art — very reminiscent of Sin City. This style serves double duty – adding real visual flair and interest to the game while at the same time hiding the Wii's lesser graphical prowess. The only color is red (well, a little yellow too), and almost all of that red is blood. And there's lots and lots of blood.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2009.