The Punisher

The Punisher is a brutal third-person action shooter from Volition, built around the comic-book antihero Frank Castle, who settles scores with the criminal underworld one floor of mob headquarters at a time, from warehouses through casinos to dockyards, each time facing a slightly tougher gang. A key feature of the game is its interrogations — after stunning an enemy, the player can choose from a set of drastic, often blackly humorous ways to beat information out of them or dispose of them outright, which set the game apart from typical cover shooters of the time and gave it a distinctive, controversial identity. The player can also take a more open-ended tactical approach, since many enemies can be dealt with through traps set directly in the levels' environments, not only through direct firefights.

The PlayStation 2 version launched the same year, 2005, as the Xbox release, on weaker hardware, which showed up as coarser textures, lower-resolution environments and character models, and a somewhat shorter draw distance in the more sprawling, enemy-filled levels. Additionally, due to European classification rules, some of the most brutal lethal interrogations were cut or toned down on both PS2 and Xbox in certain European regions, while the PC release and the American console versions kept the uncut content.

In terms of gameplay, it is otherwise the same game with an identical set of weapons, missions, and story scenes — no content was added or removed — so the main differences in the PS2 version lie in graphical performance and regional censorship, not in content as such. Anyone who wanted to experience the Punisher in its full, uncompromising form without censorship cuts had, in 2005, the American console or PC version as the better option rather than the European PS2 release, where classification boards took a stricter view of how drastic the interrogations could be. Even the censored PS2 release, however, did not lose the game's main draw: the choice between a stealthy approach and an open firefight.

Why play it: Anyone craving the uncompromising street-level brutality of firefights and interrogations inspired by the comic will find the same gameplay on PS2 as elsewhere, just with noticeably softer European censorship of the violent interrogations.