Reviewed: February 1, 2005
Reviewed by: Blake Kenny
Publisher
THQ
Developer
Volition
Released: January 17, 2005
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature
8
7
7
7
7.7
Supported Features
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Truth be told, I may or may not be the best person to review a game based on Marvel’s classic comic character The Punisher. Main reason being, I worked in a comic shop for 2+ years and collected Punisher comics religiously for 7-8 years. I simply love this character. I Mean, what can I say? Something as simple as his stark black outfit with a brilliant white skull painted on his chest just screams of cool in my book. His appearance alone tells you that this isn’t a fella to be trifled with. He’s all business, from jet black hair down to black leather boots.
While I collected over a dozen different titles on a regular basis, the Punisher was always one of my favorites. The Punisher, Punisher War Journal, Punisher War Zone; I collected them all. Not to mention the graphic novels, special appearances and one shots. Why? Well, he was a super hero, but didn’t really have any powers to speak of. No power other than an insatiable thirst for vengeance. After the tragic death of his wife and children, thanks to a mob hit gone array. Frank Castle, better known as the Punisher, does everything that we as a human race know we can’t get way with. The Punisher for lack of a better description is nothing more than a battle hardened, vigilante killer. A man who takes the law into his hands and dishes out his own brand of street justice. He doesn’t mince words; he just flat out kills the people he feels deserve it. A simple character concept becomes eternal pop culture.
The thing that I like about the Punisher, is that for a fairly goodie-goodie comic company like Marvel Comics to give a character who obviously get his jollies killing people his own book, shows you just how much times have changed. The world’s become darker place. The idea is vigilantism isn’t anything new though, even Charles Bronson walked that road in the Death Wish films; it’s just unfortunate that the Punisher’s trips to the silver screen weren’t as successful - failing not once, but twice now. I guess some characters just aren’t meant to leave the written, or rather the drawn page. Still, the attempts to expand on the Punisher mystique continue, and with this recent game from THQ and Volition, developers hope to finally get it right.
So while some may expect me to show a little bias towards this game, my job as a reviewer requires me to be objective, and objective I will be, but only for the sake of giving reader the straight dope on the game. Sure, I’m bound to take some pleasure in living out the adventures of a beloved character, but I still know a good game when I play one. If necessary, even this game won’t be able to avoid the wrath of punishment.
Some games have a reputation long before they hit store shelves. The Punisher, obviously know for its interrogation methods, is also known for the extreme level of brutality they are said to contain. Still, before I talk about the violence and some of its more annoying aspects in my summary, let’s talk about the gameplay.
In many ways The Punisher can easily be compared to games like Max Payne and to some extent - Dead to Rights. Taking place from a 3rd person, and including an over the shoulder perspective for greater shooting accuracy, this title can best be described as a run and gun action game. With simple point A to point B gameplay, shooting, stabbing and blowin’ up everything in sight is the name of the game.
Surprisingly this game does have a plot, primarily consisting of Frank Castle aka The Punisher, recounting his 3 week adventure to the police while under extensive interrogation. Through flashbacks you live out his story as he weaves a bloody trail of death and destruction through New York and other large locations.
Still, the plot takes a backseat to the action and really isn’t all the relevant in the long run. The game is very linier in design and throughout the course of it’s dozen plus levels, it’s not uncommon to kill anywhere from 100 to 150 enemy characters. With a huge assortment of weapons at your disposal, ranging from 6 shooters to heavy duty machine guns and shotguns, the ways in which you can punish crime can be pretty exiting and exhilarating.
While running around blowing people away can be satisfying, that’s nowhere near as much fun as bashing down your opponents face to face. When in close proximity to an enemy you can choose to seize them for use as a human shield. While this obviously protects you from oncoming pullets, it also allows you to torture them for information. Not only can this information help you find hidden areas, but it’s one of the primary ways to gain back some much needed life.
While the 4 generic interrogations that are available when you capture someone can be fun in the beginning, they quickly lose their charm and become dull. For more excitement, you can choose to perform a quick kill rather than question them. These vary to quite a degree and are different depending on the weapon you have equipped. Everything from stuffing a grenade into someone’s mouth, stabbing a knife through the top of their head to slashing their throats from ear to ear can be done, often with gruesome results. My personal favourite involves tossing your weapon into the enemy’s arms, and while they stand their puzzled, jam a knife into their eye socket and twist it around. Some of these kills can be pretty grisly, but dang it if they aren’t fun as hell to inflict. Hmmm… if this stuff is fun, does that mean I need psychiatric help? Naw, probably not.
While Max Payne employed bullet time to give the player the upper hand when outnumbered, the Punisher can activate something called slaughter mode. While active this allows you to throw an unlimited number of knives at your enemies with deadly accuracy. While active you can’t use your guns, but you can run up to you opponent and dish out even more devastating quick kills, not to mention regain some additional life.
To add to the already hefty level of violence, if you locate a glowing orange area within a level you can do a special kill; something like throwing a person into a coffin and slamming the lid shut, then opening it back up just wide enough to toss in a grenade and blow the whole thing to kingdom come. I wish there were more of these areas throughout the game as I often find myself becoming trigger happy and killing everyone in sight before I even notice them. Another problem I had was getting over anxious and perform and quick kill rather than a grab.
Last but not least are the special interrogations; much talked about in game previews online and in magazines. Used primarily to elicit important information from specially mark adversaries, these are the most violent kills off all. These range from running people through table saws, to dunking their heads into nitro-glycerine and popping holes through them with a nail gun. Fun stuff, expect for one annoying aspect. I’ll talk about that in the summary.
All in all, that’s the Punisher in a nutshell; kill, kill, then kill some more. It can get sort of old and repetitive, but there’s something about this game that kept a sick and twisted individual such as myself playing, perhaps the curiosity in what was going to be shown to me next. Graphic or not, it was like a car wreck, I just couldn’t look away.
The first thing I can say about this game in the graphics department is; holy smoke does the Punisher character model look awesome! While he’s not much to look at while you’re running around, whenever you get a close up view and see the level of detail that went into creating his face, wow, he’ look just like you expect him too. Weather beaten, war-torn features, terrifying and heartless. Coupled this his long leather trench coat and that ominous white skull, he’s simply incredible.
Other character models also look pretty good, but when you’re bound to kill over a 1000 people before the games over, you get pretty tired of seeing the same models over and over again, even their texture seem to repeat. Thankfully the Havok engine makes taking them out fun and unpredictable, even if they do all look the same.
Level design is also well done, nothing exemplary, but above average. While jungle location weren’t anything special, indoor levels like the mansion, funeral parlour and scummy apartments were well done and loaded with detail. The only downside was the very minute level of interactivity you have with the places. While chairs may fall over and glass might break, you just don’t seem to be able to destroy as much stuff as you feel like you should be.
Overall the game looks pretty good; it’s even better thanks to the great cinematics and even better CG sequences. However, The Punisher never really pushes any boundaries. What’s done well in this game is exceptional, what’s not so great is simply passable – nothing more.
Aurals are somewhat of a mixed bag. While some areas of the game are highly impressive, other can be a little weak,
The voice acting supplied by Thomas Jane from the recent Punisher film, along with the work by most of the other vocal leads are fantastic and very well done. Ambient voices, like the screaming and groaning from your victims are also impressive, not to mention the huge cornucopia of fitting curse words you’ll hear them shout out. In addition the sound of your victims choking and gurgling on the blood of their own slashed throats is particularly good; definitely giving you a great sense of the damage you’re inflicting.
Other effects, like the rumble of the heavy machine gun and the satisfying blast from your sniper rifle are booming, even more so if you’re fortunate enough to have a Dolby Digital surround system with a large subwoofer.
In fact, the weakest area of the game in my opinion was the music. While the game did play appropriate, gangster style tunes when necessary, the audio was fairly subdued and the game would have benefited from a harder edge rock/metal soundtrack. Still, these grievances are minor and overall the game provided very above-par audio.
Placing value on such a simplistic game idea can be rather difficult. True Punisher fans are likely to get a little more into this title than casual gamers, but with unlockable weapons, comic cover art, concept art and other minor game modes, like the challenges, there’s plenty here to keep players, especially fans coming back for more. The big question is, will they? While it was enjoyable for me, at least the first time through, even I see little reason to travel through the game’s primary adventure more than once. It might be worth plugging in to show some buddies a few interesting kills, but that’s about it.
While I can’t say I regret the purchase of The Punisher, pickier players would probably enjoy it more as a weekend rental. Most people will probably manage to blast through the game in about 12 hours like I did – and even on the hardest setting, I found myself having very little difficulty completing it. Great game, but it would have been more enjoyable with a slightly smaller price tag.
On a small side note, before I lay down my final thoughts, I have to say that I was a little turned off by how this game, despite it graphic nature would choose to shield my young, impressionable mind from the more disturbing scenes. Whenever you perform a special interrogation kill, the game goes black and white ala Kill Bill. Hell, I work in a place that forces people to produce ID when attempting to purchase an “M” rated game. Now why I should be allowed to buy such a violent game, and then be protected from the more graphic moments - I’ll never know.
To be honest, these black and white moments were very distracting for me, and actually removed a lot of the pleasure I had in acting out the part of a sick and twisted bastard. For shame! Was this Volition’s choice in censorship or the ESRB’s? I don’t know, but I’m an adult, I’m old enough to buy “M” rated games and should have the right to govern my own sensory stimulation, however over the top it might be.
As it stands, games like Blood Rayne 2 were far my grotesque in my opinion. I think the difference lies in the fact that in Blood Rayne 2, you kill people, in the Punisher, you take pleasure in the torturing them before you make the kill. Is that where we draw the line? It’s okay to kill, as long as you’re not taking pleasure in it? Heck, every videogame player I ever met enjoys whacking people. I don’t know, seems logical to me. Let me know what you think.
Anyhow, I had a little rant there, now where was I? While the two Punisher movies might have sucked to high heaven, the Punisher game comes extremely close to capturing the true essence of this infamous character. With the interesting interrogation methods, the righteously violent quick kills, and hundreds of enemies to mow through, this game has a lot of gratuitous excitement to offer. On the downside, it’s really nothing new and doesn’t add a whole lot of freshness to the table. It’s sort of a “been there, done that” action adventure with a few neat twists for the mentally disturbed.
Overall I enjoyed the game, but can’t whole heartedly recommend an expensive purchase to anyone but the most diehard Punisher fan. If you ever see it nice and cheap down the road, then snag it up. It’s definitely fun for a little mindless fun – and if you’re into over the top violent gaming, you won’t be disappointed.