The Punisher: No Mercy is an action-packed arcade shooter that's easy to pick up and hard to put down.
The game offers a good variety of features, ranging from some very light character customization to badges and tournaments. There's also a very short, but still sweet campaign mode that plays like a multiplayer game but has a story being told through comic book cutscenes. These cutscenes are stylish, but ultimately do a poor job of telling the story due to the still images and obscure narration. Plus, there are a ton of annoying in-game voices that will likely cause you to turn the voice effects off, and upon doing this you can't hear the cutscenes, which feels like a rather unpolished aspect of the game. Fortunately, you can re-watch the cutscenes from the menu. There's also a co-op mode for the story, but unfortunately you can't play it locally, and the only way to find another player is to invite someone with a private message.
There's a strange disconnect between the gameplay and the story. A cutscene might show The Punisher being beat up by a criminal or searching for a building, and once the actual game portion begins you'll be running around on a map that's completely different from the one shown in the comic strip, killing random enemies for no reason at all other than to progress. It makes the story confusing and hard to follow, and it's over incredibly quick to boot. There are about three or four missions in the story, and all of them simply involve killing a certain amount of enemies or surviving waves of foes. The gameplay is still fast-paced and fun, but it feels less like a story mode and more like a simple practice mode.
There are eight characters in the game that you unlock over the course of the campaign which you can use online, but if that's not enough for you, then there are also a boatload of additional costumes for each characters that can be unlocked from achieving certain tasks in multiplayer, like getting a certain amount of headshots, or killing a particular character a certain amount of times. Character customization isn't especially flexible, but with so many costumes available to you, you should still be able to create a character that fits you. You can also choose two perks for your character, which allow you to do things such as run faster or add upgrades to your gun. Plus, you can choose a close-range weapon, far-range weapon and special weapon. All the weapons are fun to shoot, and you'll likely want to experiment with them to see which one best suits you. Plus, you can upgrade weapons in matches to add things like scops for increased accuracy or new barrels for increased damage.
The problem with the perks and weapons is that they're not balanced especially well. You can walk around with a vest to protect you from damage and a giant laser gun and mow down pretty much anyone in your way, and perks like weapon upgrade give you a large advantage by giving you special upgrades as soon as you begin. As fun as the weapons and perks are to use, it can be incredibly frustrating to be killed by a guy with a laser rocket using a bullet proof vest when all you've got is a machine gun and sprint perk. This issue is most noticeable in linear locations like narrow hallways, where people run amok, spamming rockets in every direction.
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 takes 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.
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 like their actors were in a hurry. One character has an Irish accent that sounds incredibly fake. The dialog ranges from cheesy good to downright bad, which 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 dialog 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 amount 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.
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.
So should you download The Punisher: No Mercy? Absolutely. It has a fair 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.