MadWorld Hands On

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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.