Like a mix between Max Payne and Hitman Blood Money, with a little sprinkle of the PS1 spider-man game. Max Payne's inspiration is the most obvious: shoot dodging in new york as a vigilante just goin and killing bad guys. Blood money is the ingredient with the apartment, upgrades, weapons, hit list, and stuff like human shielding and flashy accident kills. And the final perfect ingredient is the spider-man ps1. That game was a cool game where other characters crossed over willy nilly and it felt like a comic book. Frank narrates and it's written in yellow comic narration bubbles, with some familiar faces visiting you on your journey. It feels like a part of the marvel universe but not to the point where the world feels small.

These are all coincidences, right? totally? WRONG! Max Payne narration is in this game. You can dual-wield ingrams. Coincidence? at this point, if you're calling coincidence you're either a dumbass, a stupid person, or both. Hitman blood money choir is in this game's soundtrack. Not only that, you pop out of a casket with a machine gun killing all the funeralgoers. Coincidence again? Absolutely not!

And there's a secret other inspiration I never told you about. What if I described to you.. you airdrop into a jungle filled with soviets trying to shoot a nuclear weapon guarded by a tough tall Russian man with blond hair who gets set on fire and continues to chase you and you escape the place on a plane with your newfound buddy? You'd say that's obviously metal gear solid 3 snake eater. You'd be right, but you'd also be right if you said it was one level of the punisher.

So why am I giving this game such a high score if it just copies off the best games ever? That's easy: number 1, it rules. It's awesome. number 2: It came out before blood money. And if there's even a one percent chance that this game in any way influenced or inspired the greatest videogame ever made then we need to treat this game as royalty.

Now the games own merits: The interrogation system is genuinely fantastic and im shocked how new superhero games especially batman have not used the system. I obviously used the fan patch that restored the extremely gory and violent torture minigames and it was great. The only problem about it is you lose points for killing a guy in the torture minigame. Probably put in there to penalize you for failing it and going too far. But even if you get the information out of him and THEN kill him in the torture minigame it still loses points. But if you pull him back into shield and quick kill him you get points. It's kind of a sucky oversight.

The level variation is extremely awesome. Crackhouses, chop shops, zoos, mgs3 jungles, towers, jails, you name it. But the last 2 or 3 levels get kinda ridiculous with the number of armored enemies they throw at u. Those guys reward a slow playstyle with the rifle where you go for headshots and it's not really fun.

Anyways it's super awesome and a great surprise. And make sure to download the uncensored patch otherwise what's the god dam point?

This is so dangerously close to still being well worth your time in 2022. It's full of lovely little details, not just nerdy comic book references. Things like Big Frank changing up his costume depending on the level, individual unique reloads for each weapon depending on whether you're dual wielding/holding a human shield and, of course, the ludicrously violent interrogations/special kills, which you can see in their full uncensored glory with a small mod for the PC version. The levels are fairly varied and the shooting, for the most part feels good.

The issues lie with the fact that this is a game that came out just before the Xbox 360 and that standardisation of controls between PC and console. I played this with a keyboard and mouse and it felt really awkward at times - this is definitely a game that will be way better with a pad - but I was stuck with the PC release because I wanted to see the uncut gore. Such is my life.

Although fundamentally a bit generic, the source material and the aforementioned little touches make this a little more memorable than similar titles and with a few tweaks to the controls and if there's ever decent pad support for the PC version, you can easily stick an extra star on this.

Great TPS, awesome kickass Punisher action, great Iron Man and Black Widow cameos, end boss is nuts (as hard as it was), fuck censorship, the way they handled alternate costumes is really stupid, Thomas Jane voice acted goodness, takes inspiration both from comics and the kino '04 movie and last but not least, you can feel the Saints Row DNA in this (a lot of the moves here especially transfered over to SR3) as it's also made by Volition, a whole 2 years before Saints Row 1

also Bullseye resembling both his Daredevil (2003) and comic book appearance

Used the uncensored mod and widescreen fix, look up ermaccer, you're welcome

An oddly high effort tie-in game that does make you feel like the Punisher. Story is basic Punisher stuff mix matched from the comics that came out shortly before it. Gameplay is solid, besides a few issues, mostly in how you get health and bosses. Health isn't an issue early on, enemies do nothing and you cut them down like butter. It is around the halfway point, when enemies start getting armor and better weapons. There are two ways to heal in this game, unless you buy the most expensive upgrade in the game, successfully torturing enemies, which normally gives a lot, or killing them in rampage mode, which gives a little. Now, the ability to successfully torture gets harder as you go on, so rampage becomes your only way of healing. Some later levels become an absolute endurance run with lots of cheese. The bosses are pretty much all terrible.

Only other comment, this game is shockingly dark for a video game. You violently and brutally torture people, a lot. The game also frequently pushes you to then kill said people once you have what you want. Visually it's nothing impressive, but the context is just... very interesting for a game from this time period.

What a massive disappointment. I had this game on my wishlist for years and finally got a copy and started playing last week….I really wanted to like this game but it’s just a slog.

The positives are the punisher is cool as fuck, lots of cheesey action movie one-liners and the game pulls no punches with the gore and M rating. The selection of guns and upgrades are pretty decent and the challenge modes and medals along with being able to pick your load outs gives the game some replay value. The shooting is decent and the rage mode is fun. The interrogations especially all the environmental ones are creative and there’s a shocking amount but here’s where the problems begin…

Why am I penalized for killing a guy after I get information from him then use whatever torture method to kill him? But if I extract info from him then just shoot him in the face my score goes up? Also why the black and white filter when one of these kills are done but not other ones like when I put a dudes face in a bear trap?

The boss fights are some of the worst ever with bullet sponge enemies that run away from you in maze like environments especially on the hard difficulty. Healing isn’t practical because you have to interrogate an enemy to heal so I’d find myself grabbing a goon and walking away with them to interrogate them then go back to shooting the boss. The stick mini game when interrogating was also very janky sometimes and took a lot of the fun out of what should have been some over the tops moments.

I can’t stress how putrid the boss fights are.

My last complaint is why no bullet time? Was the game too afraid of being a max Payne clone? It should have embraced it because the diving shooting just isn’t nearly as fun.

Really bummed by this. Maybe I’ll pick it up again at some point but I can’t recommend this one.

I know everyone sings the praises of licensed super hero games like Spider-Man 2 and Arkham City, but I wanna shine a light on this game for a change. While I don’t think its gameplay is amazing and by the end it runs out of steam, I think this is probably the best adaptation of a comic book character in sprite.

Punisher is a character that really needs a writer with a good understanding of the character to really do a good job writing him. Making him too nice and you could make him generally uninteresting and another basic mercenary for hire Marvel super hero, and if you write him as a murders monster you lose that connection to the reader which makes Frank Castle an interesting character. I personally think Garth Ennis who is the writer for this game is one of the few writers who has probably the best understanding of what The Punisher is and what he isn't. He isn’t a by the books mercenary who just occasionally goes out of his way to break the geneva convention, what he is is an extremely depressed and violent man who through a warped sense of right and wrong will do some very morally questionable ways, and then other times he’ll do funny stuff like suffocating The Russian with a giant fat guy. The game does an amazing job with that characterization with the addition of the interrogations minigames. You’ll have to scare the ever loving shit out of crooks by doing all shorts of stupidly violent thing like hanging them over a meat grinder, curb stomping them, pushing their body into a wood chipper, pushing their head into a bear trap, tangling them over a hungry shark, and many many more. After a certain point these methods of killing people go from gratuitously over-the-top; to flat out ridiculous doing a really good job capturing that very over-the-top nature of Ennis’s work on Marvel Knights and Max. It’s a damn shame that most of this game has been censored to hell and back but oh well you can just mod that stuff out and play it the way Volition meant it to be, violent as hell and

When it comes to adapting a character from one medium to another a lot can get lost in the translation (Hell I went on a whole tangent about that in my Deadpool review) but I feel the general essence of what made Garth Ennis’s runs so great did make it to this game still intact, sure the basic gameplay is nothing to write home about but it’s still really fun, the run and gun style of gameplay the Saints Row series would spawn off from is still leaps and bounds better than it has any right to be, and the arcady nature of it’s score system really does give way to a lot of replayability, it’s a really great time license tie-in jank aside. If you like Garth Ennis’s run of Punisher then I think you’ll get a lot out of it, and if also like weird esoteric 6th gen games that’ve been mostly forgotten by the general public and are only remembered by weirdos who unironically laugh at Family Guy jokes then it’s 100% for you.

The violence is through the roof, enough so that the special interrogations and kills were originally shown in black and white and at forgiving angles (although there are unofficial ways to remove that) and honestly it would be too much if the graphics were any more realistic. It's what really sets the game apart from the long list of third person shooters that are out there; not many games let you use drill presses, table saws, electric wires, fork lifts (etc, etc) to torture criminals before you kill them. But if you take it more as a B-Movie game trying to entertain you with the most ridiculous kills possible, it can be pretty fun. (My favorite was holding a member of the mob over the edge of a pier until a shark jumped out the water and bit him in half.) It was also pretty cool to see the Marvel license used, you get to fight with Black Widow, Nick Fury and even Iron Man makes an appearance. Overall, a pretty fun and well done game but definitely not for the squeamish.