NecroVision is a shooter from a small indie created by a couple of the guys who worked on Painkiller, the brilliant 2004 horror shooter from Polish developer People Can Fly. The protagonist in Necrovision is a Texas good-ol'-boy clearly patterned after George W. Bush. As he works his way through the zombie-infested trenches of World War I (don't ask), here is one of his early quips:

Yeah, I can't remember who's good or bad. But I'm the guy with the guns.

I love this line on a couple of levels. The first level is hearing it delivered by a rather bad George W. Bush impersonator. But on a deeper level, I love how it implies the guys in Poland who developed Necrovision have only seen Army of Darkness with bad subtitles. It would make my day if later in the game, the protagonist drawls:

I'm here to kick ass while I have chewing gum. However, I ate my last piece of chewing gum.

Perhaps I'm misunderestimating the developer's meta-dig at Bush's malapropisms. Whatever the case, my fondness for Necrovision mostly ends with the TransAtlantic trope mangling. Although there is the time you come across a German soldier gassing the trenches. Before you kill him and take his gas mask, he insists -- and I quote -- "I was only following orders!" If any shooter has earned a throwaway reference to Nuremberg, it's one made in Poland.

Now I should note that I've only played about an hour or so of Necrovision. I spent another hour trying to get it to run better. Half of that was on loading screens. This is some of the most awkward ungainly tech I've stuttered through since disabling DirectX10. The engine is so plastic-looking. The animation is terrible. The guns -- at least the few I've seen -- feel like something from a mod. It has none of Painkiller's heft or kick.

I gave up at the end of the second level, at which point you have to search an area for hidden keys while a timer counts down. After failing a few times, I felt like I had a sense for what the developers were attempting. There's lot of crazy combat and ragdoll physics and some sort of ungradeable fury system and collectibles and secrets on each level. It's got that super-sliding movement and the grunting jump from Quake that the Painkiller guys loved. Perhaps best of all, you can chuck a wicked large bayonet at a zombie and then retrieve it from the zombie's corpse.

I do fret a little about not seeing the later parts of the game. A lot of the genius of Painkiller was its wild veering progression through different places among different monsters. Does Necrovision eventually do that, or is it mired in the trenches of France throughout? Is there something at the end akin to Painkiller's final brilliant level? I suppose the thing I like most about Necrovision is that it's enough to make a guy dig up his copy of Painkiller , which I'm reinstalling now.