— Ага.
— Рассказывай
— Я ненавижу преступность.
— Подожди, ещё. Давай, говори.
— Зачем?
— Ну, говори.
— Я ненавижу прьсту... Преступность.
— Ну, много чё говори.
— Вас не достало уже это?
— Ну. Касл, давай, чё ты.
— Ага. А чё я? А чё вы?
— Ну, давай, Касл, ну, излагай.
— Излагаю всё, как есть. Я спешу.
— Ну, давай, Касл, иди. Пока.
— Пока.

A fabulous, cheesy, gory gem of a mid-2000s license game. The headlines for Punisher 2005 will obviously be about the grotesque interrogation scenes, but the minute-to-minute gameplay is also a joy in its simplicity.

While mechanically it's a fairly standard third person shooter, there's enough polish here to make you smile. Enemy AI is surprisingly good, as NPCs run around looking for cover or items to throw at you. They can fling crowbars at you, nail one of their buddies by accident, and will usually even have a little quip to acknowledge that.

Punisher is full of little moments like that, plus an assortment of ragdoll physics chuckles, that make for a game that's tone can be summed up as "giddy."

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.

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

The Punisher foi mais uma bela surpresa, já conhecia a fama do jogo de ser violento e tals, mas mesmo assim fui surpreendido pela qualidade geral do produto.
A história do jogo é uma coisa bem simples, bem na ideia de pano de fundo pra explicar porque você está em tal lugar e matando X pessoas, nada memorável, mas funcional.
A gameplay é bem sólida, não tendo grandes problemas no geral, há uma boa variedade de armas, o jogador escolhe a que melhor lhe servir e dale, o jogo tem um sistema de Upgrades que é quase secundário, porém pode dar uma ajuda com upgrades de "armadura" e até um que você se cura a cada inimigo morto.
Tem muitos detalhes e coisas para se usar no jogo, mesmo que no final ainda seja sobre correr e fusilar quem passa no seu caminho, existem vários momentos que pode tomar ações diferentes, como trocar reféns, libertar ou não um cara preso e etc. É claro que também há uma grande atenção aos detalhes na violência, marcas de bala, inimigos reagindo dependendo de como você atira, os métodos de interrogatórios e as mortes especiais que fazem o sadismo interno do jogador aflorar e ficar curioso nas diversas maneiras de acabar com um infeliz que cruzou seu caminho.
Os gráficos são muitos bonitos, se segurando muito bem até hoje.
Meus únicos critissimos ao jogo seriam:
1- Uma hora seu loop de gameplay cansa, felizmente o jogo tem um boa duração, onde termina pouco antes de cansar. Além de modos extras de desafio pra variar as coisas.
2- O Boss final. Não vou dar detalhes, mas saiba que ele é chato, não no sentido de difícil, mas no sentido de não ser divertido mesmo.
Acho que é isso, é um excelente jogo pra passar o tempo e se divertir assassinando pessoas de forma brutal :)