What is "more complex" supposed to mean? I liked the Punisher game for what it is, but the game is as simple as it gets. Most of the time you can take cover at a corner or some object and do pigeon shooting of enemies. Grabbing them is a funny gimmick, the same goes for the interrogation mechanic but nothing about these "mechanics" is complex. Its also slower due to the lower mobility and slower pacing. Its one of the better licensed games in the sense that it is not shit but its not particularly good either. But I agree that calling it a clone of Max Payne 1 is wrong, the thought never occurred to me while playing it. The game stands well on its own.
Glad you asked. More complex; more variables, more content. We can argue whether Punisher's complexity has any depth or meaning over Max Payne's relative simplicity, but the fact of the matter is Punisher has a whole lot more going on.
Second, it seems suspect when you say interrogation and grabbing is a funny "gimmick" when much of the game revolves around that - to unlock new weapons, story content etc you must get gold medals. You can play the game run n gun Max Payne style without a care in the world, yet the intended way to play, or at least the true 100% completion end game goal is as a score-style game, to unlock gold medals (and thus new weapons, story content etc) via a score system, and through this the interrogation and grabbing is integral to the gameplay, to rack up a score chain. If you ignored this fact I can see why you might think the game is simple.
So how is it more complex?
Score system: medals and unlocks
Unlockable challenge mode once you beat the game.
Can select your loadout pre-mission.
There's boss fights.
Hostage situations, and points for rescuing them, as well as point loss for killing them.
Level design is a little bit more interesting than one coridoor after another of MP, with hidden stashes, various interactive elements such as explosive barrels, switches and breakable glass, and the occasional branching path.
Enemy variety - armored enemies, flying enemies, turrets, snipers. It's not a huge deal more, but still better than MP's piss-poor variety.
Many, many more melee weapons, roughly the same amount of guns. Maybe a small handful more.
Dual wielding of almost any two guns you want, ammo limitations not-withstanding.
Interrogations
Meat shields
Door Kicking
accuracy system - hipfire is a little inaccurate, fine aim for absolute precision.
throwing dudes
wide variety of environmental kills, and sometimes bonus score for doing so.
dedicated grenade mechanic
"Punisher mode" you can unleash when your bar is filled.
This game has much more going on in terms gameplay complexity, there's only one way in which MP wins here and that's being able to carry all weapons at once.
Now you could argue that regardless of all this, MP's moment-to-moment combat is still better/more fun, and I may certainly be open to that (there is not all this stuff above getting in the way of pure dude shooting and matrix-dodging), but the game is extremely simple to play, one of the most simplest action games there is, and if you can't see that then you must be dumb. I am all for pure focused shooting, but for me Doom is like the baseline complexity, which isn't actually that simple at all. Max Payne and its non-existent level design & enemy variety (as the biggest examples) is just too simple for me to fully appreciate.
Anyway, Punisher >>> Max Payne. As are many other TPS.
When I think of the early days of third person shooters I mostly think PC.
Think again. For the sake of addressing revisionist history, the number of TPS on console vs PC was always like 5 to 1. TPS early days were indeed primarily a "consoletard" venture, and remained that way consistently ever since. And it was far from all of them being lock-on in the early days too.
Now lastly, Ezekiel saying RE4 is not a TPS is just straight retarded. Shooting shit in third person is like 90% of the gameplay time.
