Necrovision is a WWI era action / horror game from The Farm 51. Some of the founders of TF51 worked on Painkiller, a hell themed Serious Sam clone. Necrovision is not a blast fest like Serious Sam or Painkiller. It's kind of a unique beast.
It has a combo system that rewards using different attacks in succession to boost a "Fury" meter. Combos also add to your bullet time supply so you can slow things down when you need to. The idea isn't bad. It encourages the player to mix it up, which I fully support.
The downside is that combos don't always happen reliably. I remember wailing away on a guy with a shovel for quite some time and getting no hits. I think the hitboxes on the zombies are messed up. And when the attacks do work, they play a canned animation which often doesn't look like the attack is connecting at all. Plus the animations for some of the combos paralyze the player for a bit, which can be fatal.
The controls are overly complicated. One button zooms in if you're not holding two weapons, but fires if you are. There's a special attack button for throwing certain weapons. There's a kick button (necessary for certain combos) that isn't even bound to a key by default. It may give you a lot of tools, but it's pretty awkward. Plus the game doesn't recognize additional mouse buttons, which could have helped balance the load a little bit.
The game doesn't look bad.
The first time I played it, I turned up the detail. The game looked like claymation and wasn't very playable. Turning down the detail to medium fixed it, and also fixed the game leaving my system sluggish, so high detail probably has a pretty huge memory footprint. Regardless of the detail level, load times stink. Plus it crashed once. So there are some technical annoyances.
And because I almost always have three images per post lately, here are the two additional obligatory images.
This is the Russian Roulette combo. It's really just shooting a zombie in the head. It's not a big deal. Other combos include stabbing a guy with a bayonet then kicking or shooting him off of it. You can get a guy on the ground them kick him where it counts to get a Boot Sector combo. You can also just kick and beat on him to get a Soccer Foul combo. If you can manage to survive the lengthy animation and land the throw, you can hurl the dagger / bayonet (from up in the first picture) end over end to get a Circus Throw combo. The game's definitely got style.
This is a dead giant with a power up floating over him (while a zombie attacks on the right). If it hadn't been for the mounted machine guns he conveniently stood in front of, I probably would have stopped playing the demo when the giant showed up.
The power up lets you get higher and higher combo levels. As your combo level rises, every subsequent combo becomes more powerful, even causing lightning bursts that knock down other enemies in the vicinity. It makes no sense, but it's pretty cool.
The dialog makes somewhat more sense, but is less cool. The game has the main character spouting awkwardly phrased badassery based on whether he's taking or dishing out damage. It's probably no sillier than normal action hero dialog, but the mediocre translation makes it painful at times. Plus the quality of the main character's voice changes. Sometimes he's really raspy and evil sounding. Sometimes he sounds normal. I mostly try to ignore the dialog.
It does make me wonder if this stuff sounds good in its original language.
The physics also seem poorly translated from another language. It's not unusual to see boards from an explosion hanging in the air, pivoting on strange axes.
Finally, the difficulty in the game is fairly serious and somewhat uneven, at least on the normal setting (which they call "Man of Courage" for some reason). I expect hard games from Eastern European designers. Serious Sam, Painkiller, Stalker, and even Crysis (not to mention the original Far Cry) will kill the heck out of you. And I expect uneven difficulty from smaller studios that don't have the resources to do comprehensive, well instrumented playtesting. These expectations are so ingrained that I probably wouldn't have mentioned the difficulty at all if the long load times hadn't beat me over the head with it.
In summary, this is a game with an interesting hook and many rough edges. I look forward to picking it up on sale and learning all the combos, then getting to the harder parts, getting sick of it, and quitting or possibly finding cheat codes so I can kick people with impunity. I do love kicking.
And impunity. But who doesn't love impunity?
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