Before we talk about The Punisher: No Mercy, I want to say this first. I had high hopes for this title. Yes, the game originates from the renowned comic series, The Punisher, but that wasn’t the only reason. The game was being developed by Zen Studio. If you followed our reviews since the start of our website, you might remember Zen Studio as the developer of Zen Pinball, one of the most sophisticated pinball machine simulator so far. That’s why we were more excited than usual when we heard that Zen Studio is in charge of The Punisher: No Mercy project. Let’s take a quick look at the gameplay.
The game itself isn’t in such a bad shape, but sadly, it doesn’t take too long before the players begin to spot problems. To put it as simple as we can, it’s a “M for mature 17+” rated game that has multiplayer aspects even in single player mode. Nothing more, nothing less. No matter how many different ways we’ve tried to experience the game, it’s safe to say that this game is definitely designed for online multiplayer sessions.
The single player experience follows the story of The Punisher (of course), and the comic-style presentation looks cool. That doesn’t mean the story telling is good though; it wasn’t easy for us to understand what the game was trying to tell us. Fortunately(or unfortunately), miscommunication between the game and the player doesn’t matter much because every single level is pretty much the same. The player kill a certain number of bots within a certain amount of time. You kill, die, respawn then kill some more before you die again for another respawn. It’s basically a series of arenas with bots, like Unreal Tournament back in the day. It gets old rather quickly unless you’re a die-hard fan of the genre.
Talking about Unreal series, this game is based on the Unreal Engine 3, and it also utilizes the PhySX engine from nVidia. The graphics is sharp and very well detailed. But this isn’t going to really impress many gamers though due to the lack of good design. What’s the use of shiny, high quality textures if the enemies look like background thugs from 80′s movies? The main characters do look good, but you don’t get to even see them while you’re playing unless you fight them in the boss battles. And you hardly find any amazing in-game physics in the game. Yes, it’s a budget priced title, but I did want to see more from the UE3 and the PhySX engine. The audio is alright, and surround sound is a welcomed addition to such a genre where spotting your enemy by sound can be crucial. But for some reason the default audio settings were set to have loud sound effects and 50% BGM volume, making it hard to feel the dynamic sound until we tweaked a few audio volumes here and there. We came across a small audio bug where after the player dies in single player, the moment before you respawn, the BGM disapears and you hear nothing but silence. Weird.
The overall online gameplay experience wasn’t too bad though. You can use items you’ve unlocked in single player mode in your multiplayer sessions, and special skills called “mods” will also add another layer of strategy to the game. It might not be as deep into gameplay as some of the popular titles out today, but this kind of gameplay kind of takes me back, and reminds me of the good ol’ Unreal days.
Personally, I would actually prefer 60 frames per second with a bit lower texture quality or less polygon numbers, especially in online FPS multiplayer sesesions. Many gamers do own LCD HDTV that has about 6ms responsive time, and with 30 frames per second, it could make sensitive eyes a bit tiring. I also think that the cussing with F and S words between characters wasn’t worth the M rating from ESRB, but these are my personal preferences so it may not matter much to you.
So, will this game be for you? We can’t say for sure. I mean, I’m not a hardcore FPS gamer that beats every FPS out there, but when I play, I do stay on the top of the scoreboards in online matches. I couldn’t decide if The Punisher: No Mercy is a good buy or not for the price. This PSN title cost $10 which isn’t too expensive, but there are many good FPS games out there for PS3 already. I guess if you’re really a fan of the comic series, or if you played all the other good FPS games out there for the PS3 and are looking for more, this can be a fun title. But if you’re used to high quality FPS, this can be a turn off for your fragging needs.
