I've never played and and I don't intend to since it's not my taste.

As for what the game is all about, based on reviews and players feedbacks. Mad World is just a repetitive over the top beat-em-up game that is fun for 15 minutes.

But I kept seeing people mentioning it as a great game. Why?

On a console starved of mature games.... it was a mature game, that's why.

I bought it on launch and it is one of the few games I played but didn't complete.

Repetitive beat-em-up sums it up perfectly, the art style whilst different is nothing special and I got bored very quickly.

Better than pretending The Conduit is one, don't you think?

lol, this.  

in short prior to the games releasing nintendo fans hyped them as AAA games.    god, i remember somebody on this forum hyped the conduit as the "halo" of the wii.  soo much lulz.

I've never seen anybody praise MadWorld - even before it was released. I'm fairly certain that everyone anticipated that it was going to be terrible.

Funny. I see it being proof that "hardcore AAA" games don't sell on the Wii quite often.

Agendas are all over the place, you see HD fans calling it a great game after it didn't sell that great to help their arguments, I see Wii fans calling it great until it sold poorly after which they seem to be able to find all kinds of faults in it (seriously go look at the comments for our review of the game, it's mostly people saying we were too harsh on value). Nobody likes to make comments that hurt their overall argument.

Hardcore is fair enough, but it's definitely not AAA. It doesn't belong on the Wii; the artstyle is interesting, but it would have extremely limited appeal no matter what console it was released on.

I was led to believe this was a really good game and I watched the video reviews of it often. When it came down to time to purchase, I bought House of the Dead Overkill (which sucked) instead. I never did get around to buying Mad World. Gamestop even had it for $6 around Christmas and I still didn't want it. Owning a mature title on the Wii just didn't seem like that big of a deal, anymore.

A lot of things that seem fresh and unique at the time end up just being annoying as time goes on. That's happened a lot this gen. Mad World is one of those things.

Honestly, I think has a lot to do with it. Especially early on.  Ninty fans pointed to it when trying to stave off Wii haters.  I used to see it cited a lot on this site.