Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I was really excited about this game when I first saw the screenshots. I pre-ordered my special edition but not until I started playing the game did I realise my mistake, I thought this was an update to The Punisher arcade game. They both begin with P. It still didn’t deter me as it still looked good.
Upon starting the game, there were a few red flags. If you want to skip the intro cut-scene, it says you need to press ‘A’. ‘A’ doesn’t work, the button you need to press is ‘B’. Then when I went into the menu to look at the moves list. It says that ‘up’ and ‘Y’ is it’s own move. I thought this was strange to use ‘up’ to perform a move as this is a scrolling beat em up where you are constantly pressing Up and Down. But it turns out this was wrong too. There is no move with this button combination. Then when I exited the options, it forced me into the End credits, with no way of getting out of it. I had to watch them too the end.
Before we go into the gameplay I’m going to continue with the bugs I encountered from start to finish.
There is an Animal summoning move (which the move list failed to mention) and this doesn’t always work. I couldn’t get it to work once in the last boss fight.
There was one level where I was completely stuck. I could do a walking animation but not move and none of the enemies would attack me. It was like I wasn’t there. So, I had to reset the game.
It ran OK from then on, right until the final boss, where it was a mess. I was playing as Phantom’s wife and for some reason, Phantom decided to join as an NPC and doesn’t move for the whole fight. This was every time I restarted the fight too. Phantom can’t get hit and doesn’t move. The same went for some enemies that would randomly freeze and be out of the game with their image staying but they can’t be hit. Also, the music would just stop, half way into the fight. This happened multiple times.
All of this happened in a 2 hours playthrough. If this went through the Sony office back in the day, we would have been laughing at it and giving it a hard fail. I can’t believe it passed the Nintendo quality assurance, even after the update.
Regardless of the bugs - the gameplay is pretty good. The style is emulating the retro style of beat em up, but it keeps it more interesting with the wide range of moves. You can build up your special meter to do a few kins of special moves, and when it’s full, an extra special move that does a lot of damage and you are invincible as you do it. You can shoot your gun, but it’s a bit of a pointless move as you need to equip it first so you can’t swap between normal attacks and shots quickly. The charge move is useful to start a powerful combo. You can dash attack and also do a spin move to get enemies behind you that doesn’t cost you health like most old games do, so that is appreciated. My favourite cheese option was to corner an enemy and just spam kick and juggle the enemies. This is very safe and does a lot of damage but it is an exploit that they should have removed as this clearly isn’t intended.
The move set is lot of fun and you need to think a bit more than the old-style games as you have more options. You can even choose between the Phantom and his wife for a greater variety of moves, but I would have expected more characters to unlock when I finished the game but nothing did unlock.
There are a decent number of levels but they are broken with chase sequence levels which are a real chore. They go on forever. They start off super easy but sometimes can just destroy you at the end. Meaning multiple retries of the worst parts of the game. The difficulty of these levels is all over the place too. Some took me a few tries, whereas the last one was really easy and I did it on my first attempt.
The difficulty of the beat em up levels is all over the place, with health pick ups sometimes in terrible places, like right at the end of the level, when you don’t need it. Also, only have 3 lives but the life count crosses over to the next level. There is no point in starting the level without the 3 full lives, so I would just restart the level, and I’d get my 3 lives back. If it’s so easy to do, with nothing lost, they should have given you 3 lives at the beginning of each level as standard.
In conclusion, the actual beat em up part of this game is top tier, and I think had it been released back in the 16-bit day as just a beat em up with none of those crap filler levels, it would have been remembered as a classic.
But there is a feeling of cheapness about the package, and the bugs are completely unforgivable. I can understand the developers had time constraints so probably couldn’t iron out the bugs in time, but Nintendo should have failed the crap out of it and not let it be released until the bugs were fixed. Unless things have changed since I was a tester but I can’t think of any game that I’ve played that has so many obvious game breaking bugs.
Rating – 6/10
Played on Switch
Medium difficulty
#thephantom
I was really excited about this game when I first saw the screenshots. I pre-ordered my special edition but not until I started playing the game did I realise my mistake, I thought this was an update to The Punisher arcade game. They both begin with P. It still didn’t deter me as it still looked good.
Upon starting the game, there were a few red flags. If you want to skip the intro cut-scene, it says you need to press ‘A’. ‘A’ doesn’t work, the button you need to press is ‘B’. Then when I went into the menu to look at the moves list. It says that ‘up’ and ‘Y’ is it’s own move. I thought this was strange to use ‘up’ to perform a move as this is a scrolling beat em up where you are constantly pressing Up and Down. But it turns out this was wrong too. There is no move with this button combination. Then when I exited the options, it forced me into the End credits, with no way of getting out of it. I had to watch them too the end.
Before we go into the gameplay I’m going to continue with the bugs I encountered from start to finish.
There is an Animal summoning move (which the move list failed to mention) and this doesn’t always work. I couldn’t get it to work once in the last boss fight.
There was one level where I was completely stuck. I could do a walking animation but not move and none of the enemies would attack me. It was like I wasn’t there. So, I had to reset the game.
It ran OK from then on, right until the final boss, where it was a mess. I was playing as Phantom’s wife and for some reason, Phantom decided to join as an NPC and doesn’t move for the whole fight. This was every time I restarted the fight too. Phantom can’t get hit and doesn’t move. The same went for some enemies that would randomly freeze and be out of the game with their image staying but they can’t be hit. Also, the music would just stop, half way into the fight. This happened multiple times.
All of this happened in a 2 hours playthrough. If this went through the Sony office back in the day, we would have been laughing at it and giving it a hard fail. I can’t believe it passed the Nintendo quality assurance, even after the update.
Regardless of the bugs - the gameplay is pretty good. The style is emulating the retro style of beat em up, but it keeps it more interesting with the wide range of moves. You can build up your special meter to do a few kins of special moves, and when it’s full, an extra special move that does a lot of damage and you are invincible as you do it. You can shoot your gun, but it’s a bit of a pointless move as you need to equip it first so you can’t swap between normal attacks and shots quickly. The charge move is useful to start a powerful combo. You can dash attack and also do a spin move to get enemies behind you that doesn’t cost you health like most old games do, so that is appreciated. My favourite cheese option was to corner an enemy and just spam kick and juggle the enemies. This is very safe and does a lot of damage but it is an exploit that they should have removed as this clearly isn’t intended.
The move set is lot of fun and you need to think a bit more than the old-style games as you have more options. You can even choose between the Phantom and his wife for a greater variety of moves, but I would have expected more characters to unlock when I finished the game but nothing did unlock.
There are a decent number of levels but they are broken with chase sequence levels which are a real chore. They go on forever. They start off super easy but sometimes can just destroy you at the end. Meaning multiple retries of the worst parts of the game. The difficulty of these levels is all over the place too. Some took me a few tries, whereas the last one was really easy and I did it on my first attempt.
The difficulty of the beat em up levels is all over the place, with health pick ups sometimes in terrible places, like right at the end of the level, when you don’t need it. Also, only have 3 lives but the life count crosses over to the next level. There is no point in starting the level without the 3 full lives, so I would just restart the level, and I’d get my 3 lives back. If it’s so easy to do, with nothing lost, they should have given you 3 lives at the beginning of each level as standard.
In conclusion, the actual beat em up part of this game is top tier, and I think had it been released back in the 16-bit day as just a beat em up with none of those crap filler levels, it would have been remembered as a classic.
But there is a feeling of cheapness about the package, and the bugs are completely unforgivable. I can understand the developers had time constraints so probably couldn’t iron out the bugs in time, but Nintendo should have failed the crap out of it and not let it be released until the bugs were fixed. Unless things have changed since I was a tester but I can’t think of any game that I’ve played that has so many obvious game breaking bugs.
Rating – 6/10
Played on Switch
Medium difficulty
#thephantom
