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.
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.