The Punisher, aka Frank Castle, is the original and arguably one of the greatest anti-heroes of all time. The Punisher has been featured in a number of movies as well as a number of video games. None of Frank’s previous forays outside of the pages of Marvel comics has been met with much acclaim. With The Punisher: No Mercy, we can chalk up one more attempt, this time, on the Playstation Network. Despite the fact that the Punisher should be the absolute ideal character for a FPS (sketchy villains included!), does The Punisher: No Mercy succeed?

Gameplay

The Punisher: No Mercy offers players a number of standard arena style modes; story, co-op and multiplayer, which comes with a number of standard multiplayer deathmatch and team game modes. The story mode is told through a series of comic page vignettes with voice-overs and sound effects along with the comic panels. The levels in the story mode are all based on the multiplayer style game modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch, kill X enemies in X amount of time’and survive X number of enemy waves.


It becomes immediately obvious that the story mode for The Punisher: No Mercy is nothing deeper than a means of introducing the player to the game mechanics and a means of allowing the player to unlock a few extra weapons, mods and characters to take into multiplayer. The story mode shouldn’t really take the average FPS player more than an hour to complete…which is pretty short, except that the story is so terrible, you will be glad the experience is over.

Players have the option of customizing their character in a number of ways including choosing your avatar, be it the Punisher himself or other major players in the Punisher franchise, such as Silver Sable or Jigsaw among others. Certain characters have bonuses associated with them, like Bushwacker’s bionic arm. Weapon customization is also an important part of play. Three weapons slots are available, close-quarters, tactical and special. Each weapon has three levels and can be rapidly levelled up by making kills, grabbing upgrade pickups or using the weapon upgrade mod, unfortunately, upgrades vanish when you die.

The last and possibly most important part of character customization in The Punisher, is the selection of active and passive mods. The passive mods are always working and give such advantages as active healing, extra armour or additional damage. Active mods can be activated by the player and typically have cool-down periods before they can be used again. The active mods can make you faster, instantly upgrade your weapon or make you temporarily invulnerable or invisible.


Apart from the few weapons and mods that can be unlocked via playing through the story mode the rest of the unlockables come from achieving 175 to 300 kills in multiplayer with either a specific character or specific weapon. Even 175 kills represents a significant investment of time which will be difficult for most to reach due to lack of online matches, poor matchmaking and numerous ‘Disconnected From Server’ error messages. Fortunately, once you manage to connect to a match the multiplayer action really isn’t too bad. Unfortunately it is completely standard fare. Multiplayer really brings nothing new to the genre nor does it try to separate itself from the pack.

The controls for No Mercy are fairly standard for the genre and while serviceable, feel spongy and loose. Also, typical of an FPS on the PS3, many will find the shoulder buttons uncomfortable as triggers.

Graphics and Audio

This is where the best and worst of The Punisher: No Mercy really comes out. The graphics for The Punisher are really quite great for a PSN downloadable game. The character models are very good as are the detailed weapon models and all the different arenas have a distinct feel and style to them and are really quite beautifully done.


Unfortunately, no matter how good the graphics are, the audio doesn’t quite measure up. The general sound effects and the sounds of the weapons are not too bad, if nothing special. The exciting, hard hitting metal music from the trailer is absent from the game. These are all unfortunate; the unforgivable part is just how terrible the voice acting is. The Punisher sounds like a creep trying to give free candy to children and the other characters are way over the top with hokey and awful accents. Worse still, each character has three or four catchphrases that they will repeat constantly. It is simply too annoying and jarring to ignore.

Value

The Punisher: No Mercy looks like a retail console game, plays like an FPS from 5 years ago and can be fun, if you can find a match online. This was not the game we were hoping for, the Punisher licence seems to be wasted here for the potential this game could have been. The unlockable weapons and mods would be worth it, if it was actually fun to put in the time required to get them. In a couple of short hours one can get just about everything out of The Punisher: No Mercy that they will be willing to get. There will be little value in coming back for more.

Conclusion

While the Punisher will probably always remain one of my favourite comic book anti-heroes I’m afraid that the next time I read one of his comics I may end up hearing that terrible voice in my head. The true punishment here is playing The Punisher: No Mercy.