In a recent comment, Brandon asked “MadWorld disappointing?  How is that even possible?” So I figured I’d take this time to explain how I managed to be disappointed. It wasn’t really as difficult as you might think. Since I’m primarily making a point here, this article will be more of a complaint about the game than it is an actual review.

When you first see the game pop out at you in black, white, and red, the style is indeed striking. But that’s about the only thing the game has going for it. After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.

I’ll admit that the above is my chief complaint – the game is a brawler with just about no brawling. Either you’re picking up guys and walking slowly around to the various environmental hazards to score extra points, or else you’re using the chainsaw for max damage. It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.

I also found that the game went from too easy to too hard far too quickly. Easy in the first couple levels is forgivable, since the player needs to learn the controls to play the game. But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

Gameplay aside, I had a bit of issue with the violence. While I have no problems with blowing people into chunks in Fallout 3, tearing enemies in half in God of War, or slicing up countless foes with a beam katana in No More Heroes, something about the violence in Mad World bothered me. It didn’t offend me, it annoyed me. Why? Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.