NecroVision

The Farm 51

This review was originally written in 2019 and has been  heavily edited and updated.

images c/o GameFAQs

Did you ever feel like the World War I shooter genre was... lacking? Like it needed some kind of flagship franchise to compete with the glut of World War II shooters like Call of Duty? Well, NecroVision, developed by one-time Painkiller alumni The Farm 51, was never going to take the world by storm like Call of Duty did. But if you were looking for a game that felt like Painkiller and Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a baby and peed on it, NecroVision might be what you want.

It's late 1916 and the Great War has been raging for two years. An American volunteer in the British Expeditionary Force survives an ambush, only to find that something is happening on the battlefield, something awful: the dead walk, the Germans are in disarray and there's been sightings of monsters. His journey will lead him deep into German territory, tracking down a mad scientist, only to soon find himself embroiled in a bigger war involving a secret underground society of vampires, and hell itself. Or something. I don't know, the plot makes almost no sense whatsoever.

While it's made by some of the people behind the classic Painkiller, this isn't really a spiritual sequel. While the latter half of the game certainly leans hard into retro shooter gameplay (of the kind common to the 2000s, before the "boomer shooter" revival of the past decade or so) it's really more its own thing, and to be honest, not as good compared to Painkiller. The first half of the game, however, is very much a spiritual sequel to pre-MachineGames-era Wolfenstein, that is to say, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the 2009 Wolfenstein. You'll be fighting your way through battlefields and fortresses as monsters, zombies and angry Germans block your way. Authentic Great War-era weapons dominate the gameplay in these early chapters, and most of your enemies are going to be zombies and Germans. But about midway through the game it turns into something else entirely.

You eventually get a wicked metal glove of some kind with magical powers, and combining that with vampire weapons you'll quickly abandon the human arsenal (which you won't find ammo for anyway.) At this point the game turns into a mediocre Painkiller clone. All of a sudden the game starts throwing hordes of enemies at you with little in the way of cover, and you're expected to just shift modes from a semi-realistic shooter into the retraux action shooter that Painkiller and Serious Sam popularized. It's actually kind of frustrating how dull the game gets. Enemy variety is quite limited, and you'll be spending a lot of time going through one boring chamber or corridor after another. It only improves in the last few levels where you get to ride a dragon for a bit.

More to the point, this is where the plot goes completely off the rails. It's almost as if the game itself is two different games in one, and it leads me to suspect that there was trouble during development. Lending credence to this is the fact that the game is also buggy and clunky; part of that is the Painkiller engine just isn't suited for some of the things this game tries to do, but part of it also is that the engine is a piece of shit in general. Long load times, strange slowdowns and other issues, scripting bugs...

It's honestly a shame. The World War I theme is a ripe one, one that studios have successfully mined in later years, but for whatever reason it spent some of gaming's best years being neglected by all but a few strategy games and combat flight sims. NecroVision proved before Battlefield 1 that you can make an interesting FPS game, but it also showed how to ruin it.

 

-june❤