MadWorld

I saw a pigeon get hit by a bus today. A London intersection, a looming 73, Speckles McFlappy looks the wrong way for one soft second, and he's gone, taken from us in a misty red explosion and ensuing drift of dirty feathers. It was incredibly disturbing to watch, not least because some school kid carefully picked his way into the middle of the road a minute later to deposit a Polo Mint halo on the body. (I imagine that, right now, the same child's probably quietly strangling a pig, or chopping up his own step-family.) Weirdly, however, an hour after this tawdry event left me shaking, I was chainsawing a perfect stranger in half and then throwing his lifeless corpse into a dumpster, laughing my head off throughout.

All of which is to say that MadWorld's relationship with violence is rather special. MPs will froth, petitions will be signed, and Germans will go without, but in reality, PlatinumGames' wild street fighter has as much to do with real brutality as a 200-stone man lurching back to the all-day buffet with his own home-made plate has to do with food: both are exercises in excess. This isn't just violent; it's so violent that the overall effect is one of stunned high spirits. That's why MadWorld's closest parallel is not Gears of War, or even Hostel: it's something like that annual festival in Spain where everyone gets hooped and then chucks tomatoes at each other until somebody dies, or they get bored, or they simply run out of tomatoes.

Don't get me wrong: SEGA's new Wii title has comfortably earned its 18 certificate, and the flavours of arm-lopping, bone-crushing, and face-grinding made available to you in the opening chapter alone is enough to suggest that we're going to need to add a few lengthy additional clauses to the Confessional, just to cover off all the spellbindingly imaginative splatter at your disposal. But, even a few minutes into the game, putting a street sign through someone's neck isn't going to make you whimper - it's going to make you smirk. This is button-thumping, point-scoring nonsense of the highest order, and you can leave your real-world tears and post-traumatic stress for the likes of Speckles McFlappy and his Spearmint wake.

Almost everything in the game world has been rendered lethal by spikes or blades. If copycats are going to try this at home, they're going to have to learn to weld.

As you may have suspected, MadWorld's plot is a gleeful contractual obligation. A city's been cut off from the mainland, a murderous game-show is taking place in the streets, and you're caught in the middle. There's revenge, there's confusion, and there's probably a twist or two, but essentially your job is to head through the levels, killing everybody you see, as gruesomely as you possibly can. The protagonist's named Jack, and that's about as deep as things go on this one.

Good. You don't want complex motives, narrative brilliance and emotional journeys from MadWorld. You want a herd of stylish disposables to wade into, and a weighty stack of nasty things to do to them up close. On this front, the game seems entirely capable of delivering.

Throughout, MadWorld restricts itself to a modest palette of black, white and red (okay, and occasionally a bit of yellow), to create visual effects which turn out to be anything but modest. The results of what should be a pared-down approach is actually a cartoon explosion of chaos which blasts across the screen like an x-ray, and leaves other, busier, games looking distinctly wanting. And, having played the opening section, there are no signs so far that long-term variety will be a problem, the first level alone providing a stylish tangle of strikingly skewed alleyways, industrial machinery, and a cinematic big-city waterfront, while the grubby newsprint veneer adds a confident coherency.

Cut-scenes feature a sexy fetish lady decked out in a frankly hazardous bra. This, however, is a picture of a gurning villain.

And it's not just a looker: the development team has sharpened the Wii's often fuzzy controls to something approaching glinting precision. With the nunchuk handling movement, A and B unleash a quick punch and a slash of the arm-mounted chainsaw respectively, with a sharp yank of the remote up or across providing stronger special moves such as an uppercut and a horizontal slice. The A button also works contextually for actions, allowing you to pick up objects and grab hold of enemies, while another quick shake on the remote will launch them through the air. Despite the range of moves available, MadWorld's more than usually responsive to quick gestural commands, and shows a winning intelligence when it comes to interpreting your inputs.

The absence of a lock-on can make brawling a little confusing for the first few minutes, but it quickly clicks into place, and soon Jack will be knee-deep in the mob, fists connecting left, right and centre. A few quick blows to the game's early enemies will send them into a stun, which allows you to deliver brilliantly gruesome finishing moves - punching their heads off, or chainsawing them down the middle, for example. It sounds like Gears, but where that game ends tends to be where this one begins, and those are just the appetisers for a smorgasbord of nasty overindulgence which also includes options to rip out an enemy's heart and squish it, or yank off their skull and shake their spinal column about, like it's the world's yuckiest set of maracas.

But these basic attacks amount to nothing but the simplest of MadWorld's melodies - if you want to play the full grisly symphony, you're going to have to bring in the environment itself. That's why each level provides so much scope for experimental butchery: untended electrical panels spark at you from pillars, while huge industrial fan-blades chug quickly on the walls, and burning barrels are scattered around the streets. Any one of them used on its own will provide a pleasing shower of gore and points, but the real skill comes in chaining them together: why simply smack an enemy over the head, when you can stun them with a few backfists, jam a tire over them to immobilise their arms, shove them into a flaming oil drum, and then throw their charring body into an open dumpster, and watch the heavy lid chop them in half? I feel a bit weird suggesting that kind of agenda in the cold light of day, but in the midnight fantasyland of MadWorld it becomes an innocent, tentative delight - a happy exploration of cause and effect that seems entirely natural.

It's in drawing out these combos that the big points are found and the weapon unlocks begin, and the more you play of MadWorld, the more apparent it becomes that it's a numbers game at heart - every bit as score-fixated as Geometry Wars or Robotron. Enemy AI, while initially simplistic, rises to your challenge as the game progresses, your targets breaking free of headlocks and doing their best to surround you, but the baddies remain a raw material for your invention more than a challenging and tactical adversary. They're there to be sliced and pummelled as much as to fight back, and the long-term skill progression seems likely to come from doing away with them spectacularly to beat the score challenge set for each level rather than in simply staying alive.

Mini-games like Death Press and Man Darts are as enjoyable as their names suggest.

This focus on grisly style seems an obvious hangover from PlatinumGames' Capcom days, and it's an agenda which suggests MadWorld's lifespan may be significantly extended beyond its status as a bloody-handed curio of the beat-'em-up market. Long after the kinetic impact of the splatter fades and the gruesome cabinet of curiosities that makes up the level design has lost its power to comically disgust, you'll be left with a fighting game that, as with The Club, plays like a series of gratifying logic puzzles, with maps ready to be memorised and perfected, and enemies reduced to what they truly are: nothing more than pulpy receptacles for points. Special weapons, such as spiked bats and twin blades, may initially seem like gruesome toys, but they soon become necessary tools of the trade: an extra layer of score-boosting fanfare to add to your carefully planned replays.

Despite the explosive splatter and screen-filling violence, the most important thing to keep your eye on is the score counter.

So far, the result of all this clockwork carnage is looking rather special, promising a game as immediate and rewarding as Smash TV, but with the same level of style and flourish as Jet Set Radio. That's an unusual combination, to be sure, but so is a splinter of road sign through your fleshy temporal lobes. In the end, perhaps such strange mixtures are to be expected: after all, MadWorld's a Japanese game that seeks to simultaneously parody, celebrate, and satiate the jaded tastes of a Western audience. That's a pretty neat trick to pull off, but given how confidently PlatinumGames wrings a sense of Technicolor spectacle out of its monochrome presentation, trickery hardly seems to be too thin on the ground.