So, what do we have here then? MadWorld has always been a pretty interesting title to look at given its rather striking black-and-white comic book graphical style and the bizarre reality-based TV show theme, but now it’s actually out and in our hands is it actually up to any snuff?

Thankfully, the majority of the answer is yes. For all the promise the idea had and for all the eye candy it provides, running through the spine of the thing is an enjoyable and brutal, if a little samey, third-person action gaming experience. Running through levels skewering people with road signs and throwing others into giant mangles is curiously good fun, and the whole over-the-top nature of the thing makes it a really rather engaging title to run through for its relatively short lifespan.

Kicking off as Jefferson Island is cut off from the outside world and its inhabitants forced to kill each other in order to survive whilst being watched by a huge television audience, you take control of the rather muscular, grizzled features of Jack Cayman as he initially seems to enter himself into the competition. Not all is at seems of course and as you progress the story adds intriguing twists and layers of information as to what the heck is going on, which is always a nice bonus.

Talking of what the heck is going on, a main concern from the outset with MadWorld was that the monochrome (with vivid red blood spatters, of course) colour set would lead to all sorts of confusion and disorientation as you tried to progress. In practice, though, whilst some situations with bits of scenery can get a little difficult, most of the time the visuals are well enough drawn for you to never really be able to use that as an excuse.

Lots of this is also due to the control scheme, which whilst a little steep in terms of learning curve initially becomes pretty instinctive soon enough. Using both the Wii-mote and the Nunchuck, you guide Jack around with the latter and use the former to dish out various flavours of pain. Particularly enjoyable is the use of the B button to whip out your wrist-mounted chainsaw to hack and slash through the riffraff on your way to collecting bigger and better scores.

The chainsaw isn’t the be-all and end-all of the options to hand, mind, and the huge variety of different ways to finish off your enemies will be pretty enjoyable for a while. See a road sign hanging around doing nothing? How’s about smashing it through an enemy’s head? Are those spikes on that wall over there? Looks like they’d make handy skewering points for enemies you chuck their way. Throughout the game you are presented with plenty of these little set pieces and challenged to combine attacks as much as you can to rack up more points for your efforts. Dragging an enemy to any part of the scenery that looks like it might cause a bit of physical bother usually triggers an attack command, so there’s plenty to do.

The majority of the game’s levels use these points to trigger certain bonus items, mini games and eventually the big bad boss battle at the end. It’s a pretty neat system and will see you hacking and slashing around for a good while and exploring each of the level’s nooks and crannies for items to use in rather brutal manner against anything that moves, and as such you could praise the level design for always feeling just the right size to keep your attention up.

There is a downside, sadly. Each level is set to a thirty-minute time limit, which in itself is not too bad (I personally found that I never got close to risking timing out), but frustratingly you are given a limited amount of lives to do each one with. This leads to many a scenario where you arrive at a boss battle having slashed around for a good twenty minutes gathering points only to then lose all your lives trying to figure out the pattern you must exploit, at which point the game dumps you right back at the start of the level and asks you to do it all again. Whoever decided upon this needs a bit of a slap.

Occasionally the game chucks a level at you that basically equates to a standalone boss battle, and these like the main boss jousts are pretty enjoyable. Generally they involve whacking and slashing around with your chainsaw until you trigger a QTE that will initiate some sort of uber move to take a huge chunk of energy off, and I found each to be carried off well enough to be just the right side of challenging. Their scale and the sheer preposterousness of the final killing blow moves adds greatly to the show too, with a particular favourite of mine being shooting a Mexican bandit so much that you reduce him to a skeleton by the time you’ve exhausted the ammo in the guns you nabbed from him. There are a couple of sections where you end up riding a motorbike in something akin to Road Rash, but these are somewhat dull and rather forgettable.

As you might have gathered from various passages in the review, this is certainly not the game to show your parents/kids/grandparents in order to sell them the family values of the Wii, and you know what? Good. It’s about time that Nintendo’s little white box had something that dared to go so far outside the usual limits in terms of gore and adult content, and it’s a solid enough title to mean that the more hardcore gamers amongst the Wii’s bulging userbase will love playing it too.

It is, of course, horribly violent and gritty throughout, although the visual style makes it more of a glorified graphic novel than a brain-jarring trip through Mutilation Town. Chucking enemies onto meat hooks and snapping their heads 180 degrees was never going to be a magical trip to fairyland, but developers PlatinumGames (seems they don’t like spaces) have ramped the thing up with liberal splashes of bright red blood flying around and soaking the scenery. In a way it’s quite similar to what would happen if the film Sin City had a one night stand with the old The Punisher game and gave birth to something that borrowed from both.

On paper that sounds pretty exciting, and although the game does become a little tired as it progresses (mainly due to it struggling to keep up throwing new fresh ideas at you after about half way) it is mostly cracking good fun throughout, although as hinted at earlier it weighs in a little on the short side. Thankfully there are some local multiplayer larks to be had, the best of which is the Man Darts mini game introduced in the single player campaign in which you club enemies toward a giant dartboard and watched them zap headfirst into the various points areas.

Hence, with that added bit of longevity and for the fact it’s so silly and hugely over-the-top, you can forgive the game for the shortcomings it has. Yes, the game may get a little repetitive, the announcers may use the same jokes over and over and the lives system will make you actually want to hurt someone, but at the same time it is brilliant fun and will leave you smiling from ear to ear. It’s like the fun moment where you chainsaw enemies on Gears of War, except stretched into an eight-hour gorefest backed by a fun story and striking visuals. Certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (can imagine it turning up in the Daily Mail at some point soon), but it’s safe to file this one next to No More Heroes on the ‘Odd, but good’ shelf. More please!