When stationary, Punisher actually looks half-decent. The Unreal 3 engine has been put to relatively good effect, especially for a downloadable title. Levels are dark and moody, and of a decent size, and the character models themselves look OK.

 

Obviously, it’s not a patch on AAA titles like GoW2 for example, but compared to the downloadable standards of 2005/6, it’s pretty reasonable, even if I personally find the idea of an ‘arcade’ sized downloadable arena shooter odd.

 

However, once the game is in motion, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Screen-tearing, slowdown and lag would be bad enough by itself, but this game features some of the worst animation I’ve seen in recent years. Seriously, I don’t know what the animation budget was, but it’s jerkier and less life-like than the first attempts at 3D on the SNES or Megadrive. It’s seriously, unbelievably poor, and it’s a real shame, because to me, that one issue was so bad that is was enough to kill my interest in the game completely off.

 

 

Sound isn’t much better, with some pretty weedy gun and explosion effects, very little speech, and generic, unmemorable music.

 

 

Obviously, with a ‘single-player’ that is basically a tutorial for multiplayer, one should expect to find a solid multiplayer mode then, right? Nope. Unfortunately, the whole experience is pretty dire. In the week of release, player counts were already so low that I never played with more than three other people, and that took a whole load of persistent waiting. It doesn’t help that you can only search by mode, rather than jumping into a quick match with the most people waiting across any mode. Having said that, I’m not sure playing with a whole room of 8 would have been the best idea anyway.

 

The game suffers from some terrible lag spikes, and there seem to be an awful lot of glitches and ways to cheat at the game to win, which makes the whole experience terribly frustrating. Further problems come in the fact that you don’t need even teams to start a game, and the fact that the explosive weapons are so much more powerful than the rest of the arsenal available to you that the whole game revolves around a rush to find the most powerful weapon; if you get it, you win; if you don’t, you lose.

 

 

Whilst not totally unplayable, I could easily recommend 10-20 games at the drop of a hat that I’d rather play in multiplayer over this.

 

 

"The Punisher: No Mercy" is a pretty sorry excuse for an arena shooter. With a 30-minute long ‘single-player’, and laggy multiplayer; this wouldn’t be particularly highly recommended anyway.

 

However, with a dearth of people playing online already, bugs and glitches, and atrocious animation, this title unfortunately ends up being the worst shooter I’ve had the displeasure of playing this year so far.

 

 

+ Graphics
+ Cheap
+ Punisher IP

 

- Animation
- Lag
- Gameplay