Sure, the game is glitchy and buggy and crashes and the levels are way too long and there's way too many enemies for what your toolset is and the screenshake makes it hard to see anything and it takes way too long to get to the game's gimmick magic spell gauntlet mechanic but damn is it charming. It's the only game I can think of that starts off as a WWI shooter and becomes a crusade into the depths of vampire hell to free the last dragon and fight multiple demon lords and that's gotta count for something.

(Review originally written in 2017)

It's like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Painkiller if they were made by a monkey. Don't play this game.

In detail:

Necrovision is one of the most miserable FPS experiences in recent memory: there is absolutely no redeeming quality, not an ounce of fun to be found in this unpolished chore of a game. None of the weapons are fun to shoot, none of the enemies are fun to kill, you are constantly being shot and swarmed from every direction, to the point the developer decided it was easier to give you a giant regenerating health bar and make you almost immortal than it was to clean up their mess.

The game starts in the trenches of World War 1, where you fight German soldiers before quickly moving on to zombies and demons. This is the better part of the game, though the broken game mechanics (aiming down the sights actually decreases your accuracy) ruin the experience (hilarious sections wearing a gas masks which completely obscures the screen, making you almost blind). About halfway through the game turns into a first-person hack n' slash, which means it throws hordes of infinitely respawning enemies your way, making you opt to sprint past them instead of fighting them half the time.

The story is dreadful, told through interminable cutscenes plagued with the worst writing and voice acting you have heard in an FPS, or via 400-words letters/audiologs that nobody in their right mind will listen to (what with the terribly equalized audio making their hilariously bad fake german accents completely inaudible for how quiet they are compare to the music) let alone read. The very act of moving around is a pain: you are constantly tripping over dead enemies or the rubble scattered around the levels, often finding yourself propelled through the air by the broken physics. The enemies are all bullet sponges that take way too long to kill and half of them possess undodgeable hitscanning attacks, which means you will almost constantly be taking damage.

In order to proceed, the game sometimes expects you to do something that looks like you're breaking the game, like jumping on top of the heads of a group of zombies coming out of a gate that only stays open for a few seconds.
The music feels like it's missing half the time: you'll be fighting a huge (and terrible) boss in complete silence; same goes for many sound effects that are flat out missing. What's not missing are the enemy phrases and your awful douchebag of a character's one-liners, which are so few and repeated so often that will drive you insane.

Avoid this game like the plague.

Худший шутер, в который я играл. Никакущая стрельба без импакта, одинаковое оружие, убогий визуал, скучные коричневые локации, тупые противники, разницы между которыми нет. Почему-то в этой игре все боты с пушками предпочитают вплотную подбегать к игроку и мочить его в рукопашку. А ботов много и они просто зажимают количеством. В такие моменты немного не понимаешь, во что ты играешь и зачем тут огнестрел. Игра не работает как шутер вообще. Здесь есть какие-то оригинальные механики с магической рукой главного героя, которая может крошить врагов несколькими способами, но она не доставляет удовольствия потому что противники, как солдаты, так и демоны, ничего из себя не представляют - скорее надоедают, чем вызывают желание убить их как-то красиво. Сюжет никакущий, ГГ своими нелепыми высказываниями во время игры дико бесит. Сценарист пытался прописать харизматичного шутника, но шутки слишком навязчивы и в итоге хочется, чтобы ГГ убили. Игра оставила после себя ужасные впечатления. В это играть никому не стоит.

This game is a technically unstable piece of jank. A very intriguing and sometimes very fun technically unstable piece of jank. The dialog is cheesy, the story makes very little sense, the graphics are weirdly good but the poor performance and animations make it feel like it's held together by cardboard and duct tape, and the gameplay is extremely awkward. Yet, I can't help but love this game. It plays its absurd story completely straight, yet it teeters on the brink of self-awareness.
The story involves Simon, an American World War 1 soldier who's fighting alongside the British in the Battle of the Somme. They did, however, take a few liberties with the World War 1 setting. The Germans are cartoonishly evil, the weapons and technology verge into World War 2 era technology, and there's one other minor thing that might make me question the historical accuracy of this game just a bit: demons and vampires didn't spill out of hell to fight both the Germans and allied forces in World War 1. This game has you going from the trenches of the European theater to the belly of Hell itself. It goes from fighting some German mad scientist to killing Mephisto to save the vampires and humanity from the apocalypse. It's presented through very stiff and boring cutscenes, which have people speaking slowly over still images or characters that stand in the same place for a long period of time. There are also way too many cutscenes in the beginning of the game, when you're itching to get right into the action. I'll leave the discussion of the endings, all of which are stupid and awful, at the end of this review. An aside, Simon being a folksy southerner who says one-liners that reference other shooters or Evil Dead is a hilarious contrast with the grimdark World War 1 setting.
The graphics are decent for a game made in 2009, but if you don't turn off anti aliasing and VSync, the game will slow to a crawl if you use fully auto weapons. The loading times can take up to a full minute as well, which is absurd considering this game is almost 15 years old. That's all loading times. So every time you die, you're going to wait a minute to load your last save.
The gameplay is pretty weird. The first half of the game is basically a World War 2 shooter, with a few demons and a lot of zombies here and there. The difference between this and something like Medal of Honor, though, is Simon can take an absolute beating. All of the enemies go down pretty easily, but you are an absolute bullet sponge. This encourages you to play it more like Doom or Serious Sam with World War 1/2 weaponry, rather than playing conservatively and taking cover. Your health also regenerates much faster when you're in melee range of enemies. The melee system is not to be ignored either. Like in games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the kick is extremely powerful and can knock down entire squadrons of enemies. You can also use a bayonet or a shovel alongside a pistol, and throw any spare bayonets you may have to take out multiple people with one throw and get more fury. The combos give you a fury multiplier, which temporarily makes you more powerful by helping you do more damage, but hearing the vampire whisper in your ear that you're doing a good job at killing is a reward in itself. In the halfway point of the game, you get a gauntlet and vampire guns, making the WW2 guns more or less obsolete and turning the game into a more traditional shooter with magic in your off-hand and a powerful gun in your main hand. The game is much better after this halfway point, though the final level is awful. There are also vehicle sections, some of which coincide with bosses. The mech is pretty fun to control, basically giving you a larger and more cumbersome version of yourself with unlimited rockets and ammo. The dragon is pretty fun as well, though he can be annoying to control and feels like driving a buggy and slow fighter jet. The bosses are pretty good for an FPS game as well. This isn't really a compliment to the bosses, rather a condemnation of most FPS bosses. The only boss I could say was bad was the final boss. He was pretty easy, he just took forever to kill to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong because his health bar was draining very slowly.
The endings are all pretty bad. None of them have you triumphantly defeating the bad guys. I don't think an ending needs to be happy for it to be a good ending, but this is a game about fighting German hell wizards and ancient demons with guns and magic. It's unabashedly stupid, which I love, but needs to have a triumphant ending like other shooters.
The easy ending has you wake up as if from a dream, like nothing happened.
The normal ending is one of the few video game endings where the final boss says "join me!" (as final bosses are wont to do) and you actually join him. Simon becomes a general for Mephisto and waits 100 years to fight the demons again in 2016. I guess this game must be historically accurate, because 2016 is when the world started to go insane. I guess the demonic war he was speaking of was much more subtle than in the first game.
The hard ending is similar to the normal ending, except he kills Mephisto and assumes control of the demons himself.
The normal and hard endings are much better than the easy mode ending, though I was disappointed that he turned evil at the end of them. If it's any consolation though, Simon's demon form looks absolutely badass.