MadWorld

I'd been reluctant to come back to MadWorld - afraid it would disappoint me again - but I'm glad I reconsidered. For a relatively short burst (three levels in about an hour) it was great fun, and I think I'm figuring out the rhythm of the game.

Each stage has a surprising amount of content to explore, but trying to take it all in, at the cost of ignoring nearby killing opportunities, is a sure way of not having much fun. Similarly, if you just try to kill things as fast as possible, you won't get to see all the creative and varied killing contrivances the level has to offer. The key is a compromise: playing by ear, killing what you will, and seeing where the level takes you. MadWorld is really at its best when you treat it like a homicidal playground.

In my second attempt at level 4, I discovered not one, but two areas which I'd completely missed in my first, failed run through. One was a man-sized meat grinder, with an elevator that took me to fight a dude in a giant ... turtle suit. (Bender says, "Fuck turtles!") The other was a restaurant kitchen, where I was able to toss enemies onto a conveyor belt, and have them chopped up by some sort of robotic ginsu knife.

The characters and settings are still a riot, and luckily the story - which appears to be slowly ramping its mysteries up into some sort of grand revelation - knows better than to get in the way. The tale of an abandoned city's cruel fate is visibly and neatly separated from scenes of a pimp explaining, in rhyming ebonics, how to stuff ninjas into firework launchers.

Also, while the music offended my ears at first, once I started to listen to what it was saying - it's actually pretty funny. Many of the songs' lyrics literally describe the game's graphic violence, which just sounds hilarious. Check out the lyrics, and imagine they're being sung to modern rap-styled tunes.

Progress: Level 7: Courtyard