Ultimately, there's not much point in taking the time to interrogate your victims (apart from gaining a dash of energy). It's only the occasional one, marked by a special skull emblem, that will actually have anything genuinely useful to say at the other end of your punishment stick, and so the option to grab the crack-toasted ignoramuses and give them what's for is rather pointless. And despite the gross total of death methods being impressively high, in most situations only four techniques will be available. The really nasty, and morbidly entertaining spectacles are the 'special interrogations' that can only be undertaken in particular specific locations. We wouldn’t want to spoil what are the game’s only real surprises: but as soon as you see the flashing icon just by the industrial drill, or the bucket of acid, you’ll begin to get the gist of things.
Once you’ve got your enemy head-locked and under interrogation, it’s a matter of scaring them into talking without accidentally killing them in the process. This is done by simply moving up or down on the joystick to keep a gauge within a set meter, usually moving their heads towards/away from something dangerous; but in the case of the special interrogations, the different specifics of
each situation means that it can be unpredictable. And when you do ’accidentally’ take one of these inquisitions too far, the scene flicks to a sinister black and white mode as you’re treated to one of the game’s truly dark moments: a preposterously unpleasant demise. But, somewhat depressingly, these relatively infrequent moments are the only ones designed with any real care and panache.
The Punisher was blatantly intended to ‘cause a bit of a stir‘ with its shocking wotnots and bloody titbits. But despite its graphically violent content, it generally feels unremarkable. And because the violence is so loosely interwoven into the actual fabric of the game, it comes across in part as a nominal ‘Unique Selling Point’ included mainly to appease a ‘Marketing Feasibility Executive’ somewhere along the line. In the hands of a more discerning gamer all that blood and screaming won’t do anything to make the experience more emotive. San Andreas’ nastiness helped create a compelling and immersive gangster adventure, Resident Evil 4’s sickeningly realistic shotgun-victim physics made for fully engaging, tactical violence of an unsurpassable satisfying nature. But The Punisher does it all for the sake of it.
