Publisher: Zen Studios
Developer: Zen Studios
Genre: First Person Shooter
Release date: Available now

With the release of games such as The Punisher: No Mercy on PSN, we might just be witnessing the decline of the bargain bin. Why waste time and money manufacturing hard copies of a budget game and shipping them to retailers when you can distribute the game digitally at a cheaper, more attractive price? The current generations will be Web browsing through the latest B-list games such as No Mercy instead of doing what we all did as kids: walking to the mall and thumbing through the waist-high piles of cartridges at FuncoLand.

No Mercy is based on the straight-to-video Dolph Lundgren “Punisher” movie, and it’s a B-game to the core. There are plenty of big guns and even bigger explosions, and they all serve to satisfy the spot of the brain that distinctly makes men men. It’s a simple premise: you’re placed in some dilapidated environment, given a gun and tasked with eliminating the other dudes with guns. The better you do, the bigger your gun gets. Just like in real life.

While the game is powered by Unreal Engine 3, it doesn’t share many similarities with Epic’s much heralded franchise. That might be where No Mercy goes wrong. In fact, it seems the only thing the game has ripped from Unreal Tournament is the boisterous announcer. And it couldn’t even do that right, as his proclamations are as dull and lifeless as color commentary from Tim McCarver. Instead of adapting to today’s standards, No Mercy plays like a generic deathmatcher from the late 1990s. Despite a few promising ideas scattered throughout, the game spends more time emulating the original Quake than Team Fortress 2.

Now, just because No Mercy is a B-game, that doesn't mean there isn't some form of entertainment to be found. The comic strip-style narrative in the story mode is perfectly voiced and written (cheesy and fun), and it would make a great backdrop for a true story mode. Unfortunately, No Mercy’s campaign is just various deathmatch modes repeated over and over. While in the game, nothing seems to shine more than the upgrade system, which functions in real time. Nothing is sweeter than seeing your carbine morph into a super carbine with a telescopic lens and green laser sight on the fly. Although the Ghost mode, in which you can kill folks with mines after you’ve expended your lives in Elimination mode, is also fairly nifty.

But despite the appealing themes of No Mercy, which include killing, swearing and shooting, the game is painfully boring. What should be a fast-paced, no-holds-barred good time is tragically marred. Your character moves as nimbly as a tank in a swamp, and is often hindered by poorly designed chunks in the bland and uninspired levels. When you’re not fighting the environments, you’re fighting latency or the unexplainable hit-detection system. Or you might not be fighting anything at all, since the online community seems as unpopulated as post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. This makes it tough to enjoy anything No Mercy has to offer, since the only bot mode is Skirmish, which is straight deathmatch.

Punisher: No Mercy would be a tough sell even if there were a community for the game, but as it stands now, you’ll be paying $9.99 to play a story mode that’s about an hour long and not much else. Which is disappointing, because No Mercy is a fairly decent package. There are eight multiplayer arenas, a bunch of standard gameplay modes and some of your favorite Punisher characters. But even if you’re a fan of the source material, you’d be best advised to let Frank Castle handle this mission on his own…everyone else is.

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