When a successful comic book series has had its good name besmirched by not one but two crappy feature films, you'd need a hefty pair of cojones to decide to go ahead and make a game based on it anyway.
The guys and gals at Red Faction developer Volition must wear some pretty roomy pants, then. Or maybe they were gambling that last April's big-screen adaptation of The Punisher wouldn't suck as bad as it did. Whoops!
Either way, it doesn't matter in the end: The video game version of The Punisher, much like the recent movie starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta, mostly squanders its successful Marvel Comics licence and fearsome anti-hero.
Granted, it's better than the 1989 Punisher movie starring Dolph Lundgren (and more faithful to the comics than either flick), but that should really go without saying. I mean, come on, Ivan Drago as the Punisher? "I vill shoot you."
Frank Castle is not a happy man, but you can't blame him ... having your family wiped out by the mob will do that to a guy. In order to avenge the loss of his loved ones, Frank becomes the mother of all vigilantes and proceeds to exact bloody retribution from crooks ranging from crack dealers all the way up to crime bosses. Watch out, Martha Stewart.
Where The Punisher does things right is with its non-stop over-the-top violence, assuming that kind of thing floats your boat. Subtlety is not the order of the day here, it's all about running into rooms, blowing away scumbags with everything from shotguns to Uzis to rocket launchers, and, well, that's about it. Load up, lay waste, rinse and repeat.
While the violence is cartoonishly brutal, it does have its moments. You can take baddies hostage and use them as human shields, and any time you're close enough to an enemy, you can execute a one-button kill with gruesome results. My fave is when the Punisher hands his twin hunting knives to a bewildered foe then rams the poor guy's hands up into his own eyes. Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Ha ha!
The game's other big selling point is that you can interrogate criminals for information, extra health or just the fun of it. The standard methods of making thugs squeal include choking, punching or jamming a gun barrel into the guy's head (pleasant), and involve a mini-game in which you have to precisely tweak the thumbstick to scare the felon into confessing without accidentally beating/strangling/shooting him to death. Oops, sorry pal. Next time, talk sooner.
Certain areas in the game's mostly humdrum-looking levels can be used for special interrogations, like sticking the perp's head beneath an industrial drill, dangling him off a building ledge or dunking him into a piranha tank, among dozens of others. It's fun at first, but the novelty soon wears off.
And after getting the information you need, if you go ahead and kill the cretin anyway you generally get penalized. Plus, the screen turns black and white and flares out when you execute the kill, obscuring the juiciest gore. What's the point of going nuts with the graphic violence if you're going to get all skittish like that in the end? Bunch of teases.
On top of that, the enemy A.I. in general is shockingly dumb, with foes who will take cover behind the wrong side of an object or simply stand there and stare at you dumbfoundedly as you pick them off at a distance with headshots.
Fans of the Punisher comics will probably find a fair bit to like here, if they can tolerate the simplistic and sometimes tedious gameplay. The game was written by comic book scribes Jimmy Palmiotti and Garth Ennis, and there are lots of appearances by classic friends and foes of Frank Castle.
For the rest of us, though, The Punisher feels like a watered-down Max Payne, without the slick sense of style - even Frank's "slaughter mode" is a poor substitute for Max's bullet time.
If you're that hard up for a bit of the old ultraviolence, go rent A Clockwork Orange. The one with Malcolm McDowell, not Dolph Lundgren.
- - -
BOTTOMLINE
The Punisher is as generic a third-person shooter as you're likely to find, with its novel gimmicks countered by some truly irritating shortcomings.
