MadWorld hit the Wii in 2009 with a chainsaw on its cover and a problem underneath it. Nintendo’s console was the family machine, the one in the living room where the kids played. PlatinumGames built a game for it that opens with Jack Cayman tearing through a city turned into a televised slaughterhouse. Sega published it. Japan did not get it for almost a year. That gap tells you most of what you need to know about where this thing landed.
Trailer, via PlatinumGames公式チャンネル.
Jefferson Island, cut off from the world
The premise is a game show, and the game never lets you forget it. Varrigan City, renamed Jefferson Island for the broadcast, has been severed from the rest of the world by a group called The Organizers. They released a virus that kills in under a day and told the survivors the vaccine goes to anyone who kills someone else. The city becomes the set of DeathWatch, a recurring show with announcers Howard “Buckshot” Holmes, voiced by Greg Proops, and former fighter Kreese Kreeley, voiced by John DiMaggio.
Jack Cayman, voiced by Steve Blum, has a chainsaw on his prosthetic arm and a motive the producers can’t figure out. He gets sponsorship from a figure called Agent XIII, voiced by Jim Ward. The organizers, led by Noa, voiced by Dwight Schultz, suspect Jack wants more than the cash prize. They’re right. He’s tied to Naomi Ann Boris, the mayor’s daughter, voiced by Kate Higgins. Along the way he crosses paths with Leo Fallmont, a doctor voiced by Danny Cooksey who got trapped in the city and managed to get the vaccine.
That’s the frame. It’s thin, and it knows it’s thin. The plot exists to move Jack from one arena to the next.
Black, white and one color left
The look is the first thing anyone remembers. MadWorld runs almost entirely in black, white and gray, with red reserved for blood. Nothing else gets that color. It’s a deliberate choice and it holds up better than most of the game’s other ideas, because it does two jobs at once: it makes the violence legible in a way full-color gore never is, and it makes the whole thing read as a graphic novel rather than a game.
PlatinumGames was two years old when this shipped. MadWorld was its first release. That matters when you’re weighing what the studio got right and what it hadn’t figured out yet.
Points, Bloodbath Challenges and a tire
The structure is a scoring game wearing a brawler’s clothes. Each level is a section of the island converted into a set. You move through them linearly on a first run, then can go back to any completed level to chase a higher score or a harder version of the same challenge.
Most levels are open. You wander, you find enemies, you kill them, you get points. A few levels put Jack on a motorcycle and send foes at him as he races a track or fights in a small arena. To reach a level’s boss you have to rack up enough points first. Same for the mini-bosses and bonus challenges that unlock as your total climbs.
The signature mechanic is the Bloodbath Challenge, a time-limited minigame that pays out for a specific kind of kill. Swing a bat and knock enemies into a giant dartboard. Herd them in front of a speeding train. The game rewards invention over efficiency: throwing a man into a wall earns something, but wrapping a tire around him first earns a lot more. The point system is the whole design. It’s telling you that the boring kill is the wrong kill.
The Wii remote problem
Here’s where MadWorld gets stuck. The game wants you to improvise, to look at a room and see the dartboard, the train, the tire. But you’re playing it on a Wii remote, and the camera is third-person, and the controls are doing more work than the hardware wants to do. The result is a game whose best ideas live in the scoring system and whose moment-to-moment feel is a negotiation with a controller built for tennis.
That’s not a small complaint. A brawler lives or dies on whether the fighting feels good, and MadWorld’s fighting is serviceable where it needed to be sharp. The invention is in the design document, not in your hands.
What the sales number doesn’t tell you
MadWorld was a commercial failure. It also reviewed well. Both of those things are true and neither one settles the question of whether it’s worth your time now.
The commercial failure makes sense. A black-and-white gore comedy on the Wii, released in America and Europe nearly a full year before Japan would allow it, was never going to find a mass audience. The game was aimed at people who owned a Wii and wanted something the Wii’s library mostly refused to give them. That’s a real audience. It just isn’t a big one.
The positive reviews make sense too. Critics responded to the visual style, which has not been matched since, and to the violence, which is genuinely funny in a way that most self-consciously edgy games are not. The humor is the load-bearing wall here. Without it, MadWorld is a mean little game about a man with a chainsaw. With it, the absurdity of the DeathWatch premise and the announcers calling the carnage like a sporting event turns the whole thing into a joke you’re in on.
Anarchy Reigns and the road out
PlatinumGames followed this with a spiritual successor, Anarchy Reigns, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. That game took the combat ideas and dropped the monochrome. It didn’t become a phenomenon either.
What MadWorld leaves behind is a specific, unrepeatable artifact. A studio’s first game. A console’s strangest exclusive. A visual idea so strong that it outlived the game that introduced it. The Bloodbath Challenges and the point-chasing structure are the parts that still work, and they work because they understand something most brawlers don’t: that the fun isn’t in the hit, it’s in the setup before the hit.
The parts that don’t work are the parts you feel every second you’re holding the controller. MadWorld is a game you admire more than you enjoy, and that’s a real verdict, not a hedge. It’s worth playing to see what PlatinumGames was reaching for before it learned how to grab it.
The numbers
- Release year: 2009
- Developer: PlatinumGames
- Publishers: Spike, Sega Europe, Sega of America
- Platform: Wii
- Genre: Hack and slash / beat ’em up
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Third person
- Critic aggregate: 7.5/10, drawn from five outlets
- Spiritual successor: Anarchy Reigns, 2012, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
