The Punisher (Sega Genesis) Review

The Sega Genesis has a ton of beat em ups released from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, Streets of Rage 2 or even Golden Axe but one that you don’t see on a lot of top 10 lists is the punisher and I’m not sure why?

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There are a ton of moves you can do from throwing enemies, giving them a rolling kick or taking them out with the insane amount of weapons. We’re talking guns, baseball bats, axes, there’s even a flamethrower you can pick up and use. Oh and your special where you have to jump, press down and punch to blow up everything below you using your grenade. There’s also more complicated moves that you can do by doing the same motion as Ryu’s fireball in Street Fighter.

There’s also certain sections of each stage when the enemies are carrying guns that you get to pull out your pistol and just fire away at all of the enemies. There’s literally no point to this but hey your the punisher, time to blow stuff up.

Both Nick Fury and The Punisher are a bit different in animations but overall pretty similar. The punisher isn’t stronger and Nick Fury moves a little faster or anything like that.

The sound effects and music were okay, The punisher was definitely lacking that genesis gritty soundtrack that you’re probably used to, give it a listen and see for yourself.

It’s a real drag that you have to go into the options menu to switch the starting character.

Come on, You should be able to dive in, pick your character, if you die and have to use a continue you press start to continue and move on to select your character like literally every other beat em up ever made.

And what’s going on with this bus driver? This reminds me of my favorite episode of Seinfeld where Kramer picks up a severed pinky toe, throws it in a Cracker Jack Box full of ice, hops on a bus only to find himself driving the bus in the middle of a stick up.

This is one of those, If you want to really get the good ending you got to play it on the other difficulty games. I first put it on easy and watch how the kingpin just laughs at you taunting you to come back on the normal mode.

These types of games drive me nuts. They could have easily made the enemies take less damage or give you more health instead of just cutting the game short, giving you the middle finger and resetting the game on you.

Playing it on hard was really tough, I found that I kept running out of time and that was no fun at all. Some of the areas just have ridiculously low time set and found myself just taking a death out of nowhere to notice the timer ran out.

The punisher is actually a port of the arcade release that was done by sculptured software. A lot of Video Game Magazines didn’t rate the punisher too highly when it was first released.

Claiming the graphics compared to the Arcade game as not even close. Well Duh, what’d you expect? That’s like saying that Scottie Pippen is as good as Michael Jordan. Which might be why the punisher is so god damn expensive if you’re lucky to even find a copy.

The Punisher is a solid choice for a beat em up on the Genesis. If you’re into Marvel Comics or have played Streets of Rage or Golden Axe to death, give The Punisher a chance.