The Punisher

Written by John Nieves  on February 01, 2005

Review: If throwing a guy in a wood chipper is wrong, I don't want to be right...

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Special kills which are marked by yellow splashes are other type of ways to punish your foes. These allow you to use the environment as well and are simply delicious. One of my favorite special kills is one that takes place in a funeral home. You can throw a guy in a casket, open the lid, throw a grenade into the casket, and giggle with joy as the casket explodes.

Killing baddies using an interrogation or special interrogation move deducts 250 points from your score, it still rewards you points for killing people in other ways. In all honesty, it seems as though the decision to take away points for killing people after interrogating them was made by THQ and Volition to help appease the ESRB by showing some kind of drawback for killing bad guys that gave you the info you were asking for. Something that has already become lore when speaking of this game is the fact that the game was originally given an AO rating standing for Adults Only. Seeing as there hasn't been an AO rated game made this generation, Volition decided that it had to make some changes to bring the rating down to M for Mature. These changes came in the form of censorship when you kill someone after interrogating them. If you decide to kill someone you just interrogated, the screen goes into a black and white filter, not allowing you to see blood in all of its red glory. With a select few gruesome interrogations, the camera pans on Frank, not letting you actually see what happens only insinuating it. This takes away from the УoomphФ of the special interrogation kills and makes for a jarring transition from color to black and white filter. Although now in black and white, special interrogation kills are still over the top violent ranging from threatening to feed someone to sharks, to sticking a guys head into a French fry fryer and bringing his head up to see his exposed bloody skull under his skin. These are sadistically fun to do, and you'll definitely find yourself laughing at how brutal some of these kills are. Despite the censoring of these interrogation kills, there are so many different ways to kill people and the game is so much fun that you learn to accept it for what it is (which is still very violent). The game also features a challenge mode, and punishment mode with certain tasks that you have to do within a certain amount of time. These range from killing a certain amount of people within a certain amount of time, to using six different weapons to kill enemies with. These turn out to be fun and add a little life to the game after you beat it. Your reward..? You unlock different Punisher comic book covers from different Punisher comic book series' over the years as well as concept art from the game. Play the game on hard and reach a certain preset level of arcade points and you even unlock cheats.

Underneath all of this abnormally amusing murder lies a straightforward third person shooter which is one of The Punisher's drawbacks. Don't get me wrong the controls are extremely polished and Volition's craft is duly noted, but in its heart The Punisher doesn't take any revolutionary steps in the 3rd person shooter genre. As fun and amusing as having a guy getting violently horned by a rhino is, it's still a standard 3rd person affair and can get a bit repetitive at times. Another sore spot is that the boss battles are a bit lame with the exception of the first encounter with the Russian. While there are a few spots in between interrogations that will get a bit boring, if you can live with that you will have a good time playing this game.

As far as graphics are concerned, The Punisher is hit and miss. Hitting on all cylinders is Frank Castle's character model. I have never seen a character model in a licensed game that represented the source this well. His character model is simply perfect and I commend Volition for totally nailing that. On the not-quite-inside-the-fish-barrel side of things, a lot of this game's textures are bland and of low resolution. The insanely gratifying quick kills and animations make up for a little bit of this, but I still wish that some of the levels didn't appear so drab. All in all, there's still enough pretty in the game to overshadow some of the low-res textures found in some levels.

Thomas Jane, who played the role of Punisher in the could-have-been -better movie reprises his role as Frank Castle. In my opinion, I think he did a much better job playing the Punisher in this videogame than he did in the actual movie. His voice perfectly captures the dark humor and gravely bad ass nature of the Punisher. Jane delivers his lines perfectly, and the dialogue is 100% Frank Castle. Fans of the comics will get a kick out of some of his one liners throughout the game. This should come as no surprise as Punisher scribes Garth Ennis and Jimmy Palmiotti penned the story for the videogame.

The other voices found in the rest of the game are not as good as Jane's performance, but makes up for it with its humor. You will hear people say УOh sh*t, it's the f*****g Punisher!Ф and some crack heads will ask you if you're that УfinisherФ dude. There's definitely a lot of cursing going on in this game, but I found that it adds to the humor of some of the dialogue. That combined with the different reactions that enemies have to your murderous ways makes the voice acting fun.