The Punisher: No Mercy
Review
Simple no-frills shooter that's fun to play
by Blackened Beans
reviewed on PS3
Graphics lag and problems
Graphically, The Punisher: No Mercy has retail quality textures, effects and attention to detail, but unfortunately the superb visuals are marred by an insane amount of texture pop-in, a fair bit of lag, and some frame rate slowdown. Every time a game starts, your character and the environment take a few seconds to load all their textures, and every time you make it to a new area you have to wait for the details to pop in as well. Additionally, every time you die you go into a third-person view in which your character's textures have to pop in all over again. Lag-wise, characters sometimes jump around and you often get stuck on objects when you try to jump onto them. It's not especially common, but it's a nuisance when it happens. The game also slows down a lot during the single-player portion, but strangely not during the actual multiplayer. These problems aside, The Punisher: No Mercy is still a great looking game.
Annoying voice acting
The voice acting kind of varies. The Punisher's grizzly voice occasionally feels overdone, but at other times it sound just fine. Other characters either sound unconvincing or as if the actors were in a hurry. One character has an Irish accent that sounds incredibly fake. The dialogue ranges from cheesy good to downright bad, with some cool lines such as “The world won't miss you” and some really unnecessary lines like “Maria...” and “My time has come”. In fact, most of the game's worst dialogue comes from dying. Characters talk way too much in-game, and I heard pretty much every line the characters had to offer within my first 30 minutes of playing.
You'd be better off turning down speech volume and coming back to the cutscenes later. The music itself isn't actually bad, with hard rock soundtracks that fit well with the game's intense and fast-paced action, but they occasionally become repetitive due to the small number of soundtracks available. Sound effects are pretty much spot on and sound convincing, but other than the sounds of gunshots and reloading, there's not actually too much here. But that's to be expected from a game all about the action.
Controls
The game controls incredibly tightly. You can crank the camera and controller sensitivity up and down, and you can even change the button layout. There's no custom input included, but you do have the game's interesting original setup, as well as the basic shooter layout. There are definitely enough options that you'll find something you'll like, and once you do, you'll be landing headshots and taking out opponents with ease, and it's at that point the game truly becomes great.
There are a lot of different weapons to choose from (15 to be exact) and all of them are fun to shoot, with lots of modifications that you can unlock during matches to increase their capabilities. The Punisher is all about the shooting, and the shooting is good.
To download or not to download?
So should you download The Punisher: No Mercy? Absolutely. It has its share of graphical and performance issues, but those are nothing a good patch can't fix. What you're here for, though, is the actual gameplay, and it's as tight and entertaining as can be. It doesn't bombard you with tons of overused and annoying gimmicks, and instead gives you a gun and has you shoot everything in sight. The controls are excellent, the amount of content is insane, and shooting limbs off your opponents with a shotgun just feels right. With its over-the-top and stupid violence and slick gameplay, it's pretty much needless to say that The Punisher: No Mercy is the PlayStation Store's best first-person shooter, and one that all Punisher and shooter fans should definitely check out.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
