The best fighting games like MadWorld are Anarchy Reigns, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and The Wonderful 101. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to fighting costs you.
Filtering to fighting means you want a contest with a clear answer — you got it right or you did not. It is the right filter when what you liked was reading an opponent.
What you get: A skill ceiling you can actually see yourself climbing, and the shortest feedback loop in games.
What made MadWorld worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the fighting part of that answer, and only the fighting part.
The direct sequel in all but name, by the same studio.
Platinum again, and built around one very good idea.
Kamiya at his strangest, and the most mechanically dense Platinum game.
Platinum's combat at full depth.
The genre's origin, and the style meter came from here.
For the commitment to one visual conceit above all else.
A first few hours that can be discouraging alone. Fighting games are far better with someone at your level than against the internet.
Specifically, these are strong answers for MadWorld that are not fighting games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like MadWorld — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Anarchy Reigns. The direct sequel in all but name, by the same studio.
No. MadWorld released on the Nintendo Wii, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Much less than they were. Modern control schemes, rollback netcode and real single-player modes have changed the on-ramp completely in the last few years.
One opponent against one, or one against many. They share ancestry and almost nothing else — the picks below say which each one is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full MadWorld list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is fighting — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the fighting guide for where to start in the genre generally.