Have you ever wanted to kill a man using a toilet bowl? Have you always had the urge to slam a punk into an oversized dart board using a spiked baseball bat? Was there ever a time when you found a fish tank full of man-eating piranhas and didn’t have anything to feed them? Madworld not only presents you with dozens of situations just like this, but also hands you a never-ending supply of criminals to use as fodder in these chambers of death! Just be warned…this game is not for the squeamish.

Madworld tells the story of Jack, a grizzled badass stuck in a world where murder has been turned into a spectator sport called DeathWatch. Jack must travel to places like a Chinese brothel, a torture chamber, and an alien-filled military base with the hope of taking down enough thugs to thrill the blood-thirsty television audience, climb the ranks of the tournament, and rescue the mayor’s daughter from the criminal underworld. Unfortunately for Jack, hundreds of the most dangerous creeps in town are gunning for his spot in DeathWatch, and all that he has to protect himself is his chainsaw arm, a bevy of melee weapons, and a plethora of stationary hazards set up around the city to make things a bit more interesting.

The weaponry of Madworld has been concocted from the darkest of nightmares, as everything including saw blades, umbrellas, pirate hats, fans, spears, giant fish, soda pop, lanterns, a gravity gun, and even fireworks can be used to deliver your opponent to their final resting place. In addition to handheld items, there are a number of environmental traps that Jack can hurl his adversary into. These include dumpsters, spike walls, electrical signs, subway trains, a giant oven, fishing hooks, and even an airlock that blasts the hapless halfwit out into space. With so many gruesome possibilities, the gameplay stays consistently fresh despite the fact that nearly every level is just a giant kill room.

Madworld doesn’t just encourage your sadism, but also rewards it. You get points for every hoodlum that you kill, but are given a far greater payoff if you put a little creativity into your manslaughter. Instead of just chainsawing some jerk in half, you should jam a pole through the deadbeat’s face, hurl several knockout punches in his direction, and then toss his mangled, barely-alive carcass into a wall of spikes to get a much larger point bonus. When your score reaches certain milestones in the stage, new sections, enemy types, and weapons will unlock around you.

After about 20 minutes of carnage, a boss battle will open up somewhere in that level. The bosses of Madworld are a rogue’s gallery of assassins, psychopaths, and brutes that often lumber at you carrying impossibly huge weapons. You get to face off against Frankenstein’s monster, a werewolf, and a duo of extravagant blade masters among others, and each fight is both cleverly unique and wildly frantic. Once enough damage is dealt, a QTE power struggle will pop up on-screen that requires you to slash the Wii remote and nunchuck in the direction indicated. Successfully doing so will cause Jack to deliver some major pain and leave the behemoth in a bloody mangled mess with a large chunk of their health missing. These battles have a decidedly old-school feel to them and are always fun, especially later on when they get a bit more difficult.