In a monochromatic world sometimes you’ll cut other people just to bring a little colour to your life. Mad World is a game in development by Platinum Games (a recent addition to the Sega family) and is something very unique in the gaming world and even more so for the Wii.

Mad World takes place in a mostly Black and White world with the only other colours appearing during our preview being red (the beautiful colour of blood) and yellow.

Just like in real life when you score a massive kill score a sign will flash up in yellow telling you about it, think of this as a comic book Pow, Biff, Wank equivalent.

At first the visual style is a little bright due to the amount of white on screen and does take a bit of time to acclimatise your eyes. The effect of red on black and white is stunning though and the fact that it is so different from the pack of other Wii games means it automatically gets my attention. For doing it well it gets my applause.

The point of the game is to traverse the game levels while killing people in the most brutal and imaginative ways possible. The more brutal the kill the higher the points. You can go about your murderous mission in a variety of ways. Using the environment is encouraged as is the utilisation of various combat combinations of slashing/ripping motions.

You can pull sign posts out of the ground and then impale your opponents head with said post. In the demonstration our guide actually put two posts through the head of one person. There was a wall of spikes (yes very realistic) against which you could throw an enemy or two with force to impale them.

While playing the basic weapon is a chainsaw, you can saw people in half, and there were also some knife type implements. Without doubt many more weapons will be available. Some kills are prompted by an indicator popping up on the screen telling you what to do.

One such indicator showed how to make a motion crossing the Wii-mote and Nunchuck over each other making an X with your arms and then quickly bring your arms back into a normal position, this prompted the character on screen to use a duel blade either side of an opponents neck and severe his head from either side. Another prompt resulted in an enemy being ripped in half.

One of the most brutal kills from the demo was when a subway train was used to take out multiple enemies at once. This multikill scored a good number of points. Boss battles are unlocked by getting enough points from making enough spectacular kills. The boss battle that we saw was over very very quickly, I don’t know if that will be common or not.

I only have one concern for Mad World, will it be banned?  There seems to be enough ultra-violent content to make it a standout contender to make it an appropriate soap-box for political grandstanding. I hope it doesn’t but if it does I will be more than happy to import it.

Tags: E3 2008

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Games, Wii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.