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The Punisher PreviewWith Garth Ennis writing, fans are guaranteed a Punisher experience like no other. Latest hands on impressions
PREVIEW by Howard Brown One area in gaming that usually misses the mark is game adaptations of comics. Recently the trend has started to improve with excellent titles like Spiderman 2 and X-Men Legends. With The Punisher hitting theatres this year, reactions were pretty mixed on how the movie turned out and many comics fans just weren’t even looking forward to the game. Well, after spending LOTS of time with the most recent build of The Punisher for Xbox, we can reassure the fans that THQ and Volition have the license in very good hands. Over the years there have been a number of Punisher games released, but they were all missing one important thing: punishment. One of the coolest parts of The Punisher is that Frank Castle can interrogate thugs and make them give him the information he needs. What’s so fun about it is how interactive it is. For example, let’s say you have some punk down on his knees in front of a toilet seat. If you swiftly press up on the analog stick, you’ll slam his head into the toilet bowl. However, if you gently press up on the analog stick slowly, you’ll start to submerge his head into the nasty toilet water, drowning him. You can leave him under for a few seconds, and then bring him up for air and check to see if he wants to talk. If he wants to be a hard rock and stay quiet, then dunk him back in or slam his head again. Two bars are displayed during the interrogation process with the top bar being the overall health of the enemy (he can’t talk if you overdo it and kill him) and the lower bar is the ‘stress’ meter. The objective is to apply enough pain, scare tactics or whatever it takes to keep their stress within a certain threshold for three seconds. Go too easy and they’ll think you’re a wussy and you’ll never get any info. Go too hard and you’ll kill ‘em prematurely. Once the three second mark is achieved, you’ll get the information you need. After that, it’s all up to you of what you want to do next. You can be merciful and let the guy go, or give him the punishment he deserves. The nice thing about it is that you can interrogate anyone you come by. You’ll always have a number of techniques at your disposal, with all of them as interactive as the method described above. Some techniques involve the environment such as using welding torches, hanging fools off rooftops upside down by one ankle or tons of others. If you’re not near an object in the environment that you can utilize for the torture, you can do things such as choking someone, scaring them with a pistol to their head, punching them and more. Having this torture/interrogation element in the game is something that has been sorely lacking in the Punisher games of times past. Another cool part is that in addition to shooting baddies and killing them in the traditional way, you can employ ‘quick kills.’ Quick kills are another area that let you see Frank bring justice as only he can and can be seen as a ‘fatality’ if you will. By running up to a bad guy and pressing the X button, you’ll do one of a huge number of special kills. An example of a quick kill is if someone is running away from you, screaming for his life. You can catch up to him with two pistols in hand, place your left hand on top of his left shoulder to keep him in place, and place your right pistol right under his crotch and shoot him where the sun don’t shine. Complete with the bullet going clean through him, embedding a bullet hole in the wall, and gore everywhere. Gotta love it. Quick kills are very helpful if you run out of ammo or if you just want to see all kinds of grizzly death scenes. The mechanics of The Punisher controls similarly to Max Payne. You control movement and weapon aiming similar to the aforementioned title and fire with the right trigger. The left trigger is used for frag grenades, flash bangs or if you have a second weapon in your left hand, it will fire it independently. You can press the B button to do the dive and duck/shoot type of moves that Max has also. The Y button enters you into ‘Slaughter’ mode. In this state, Frank regenerates health, is much stronger, and kills with huge army knives. Hurling one knife at an enemy will stun him, while a second will kill him. What’s pretty cool about this is that he’ll hear voices from his past, his son and wife calling out to him from their demise and it really brings the point closer to home that Frank is psycho and thinks about this all the time. There’s nothing better than torturing a guy, having him give some weak excuse like “I have a family”, seeing the comic page overlay displaying a flashback, and then the sly remark Frank gives him after he kills him that basically gives the impression of ‘I lost my family to scum like you, so I won’t spare you just because you have one.’ What comic fans will really be interested to know is who’s on board with the writing duties. That honor goes to Garth Ennis and Jimmy Palmiotti. You read that right, Garth Ennis is on board making sure that The Punisher is an authentic game with a storyline that will stay true and please any Punisher fan out there. For those of you who aren’t up on The Punisher comics, basically Garth Ennis is widely regarded as the man that brought The Punisher back to his roots, and made him back into a dark, brooding, gritty character. All these qualities show throughout the game. Not only is this apparent in Frank’s demeanor, but in the whole presentation of everything. This is hardcore Punisher, in the meanest streets of New York City. You’ll see junkies trying to rape women and enough curse words to make the guys at Rockstar jealous. We’ve only scratched the surface of what The Punisher holds but one thing is certain so far. THQ is out to show that they’re not taking the license lightly and that they know where to go to get the talent necessary to please the fans out there. The Punisher is coming in January and for any comic fan out there that thinks comic based videogames always suck, this is the game you’ve been waiting for. For right now, we're going right back to sit down and delve even deeper into Frank's quest for revenge. Stay tuned for more coverage on The Punisher leading up to its release, right here at PCS. | |
