Playtime: 30 minutes

Played: 2025

Intro

Severed Steel is a first-person shooter in which you run, slide, jump, wallrun and dash around a small map while shooting and kicking enemies and destroying or getting things. You can also slow down time, and destroy walls and floors. Plus there's some platforming.

Review

This game reminds me of Receiver. Receiver is a very very simple FPS with a gimmick - realistic weapon interactions. It comes across as a tech demo rather than an actual game. The same goes for Severed Steel, although it is much more substantial.

Here there are three gimmicks. You can destroy much of the environment. You can use bullet time. And you can move around in crazy ways, which also makes you immune to enemy attacks. Blasting enemies through walls with your wall-destroying cannon, sliding under gaps and surprising the enemy, escaping by running over a wall - it's all really cool. But other than that there's nothing going on. Also i found that it's infinitely easier to just shoot enemies during bullet time instead of while doing stunts.

It's worth giving it a try if you got this for free or it's on sale, but i really don't see why they want €21 for this on Steam.

Setting: Some sort of cyberpunk world, lots of unclear context and bright colours. It's all about the lightning-paced first person shooting here.

It's definitely got lots in common with Mirror's Edge, the gameplay is fast and fun, and it gives you some leeway thanks to your character being invincible when she does stunts, plus the generous amount of Bullet Time it grants you. This makes the fights not too frustrating so you'll usually have the upper hand even against tough enemies.

Music and sound design are excellent and provide the firefights with the appropriate amount of thump.

However, in games like this everything comes down to the gameplay and controls, and while controls are indeed pretty good (I played KB+M) they sometimes didn't feel as tight as they could've been. I never really got comfortable with the wall-running and jumping, and at least for me there was input lag at times. The game also didn't do itself any favors by relying on relatively open environments for some of the later levels.

So in the end I played the campaign through once and that will be it for me. I'd still recommend it though, it's a solid action experience for a couple of hours, and I'm sure there's enough here for people with an interest in this type of game to go deeper into the other gameplay modes.

Maybe a 3☆ is more suitable for this game, but the way it plays just does not allow me to put less stars. Quickly go through the cons:

1. Lack of music. This game REALLY needs more energizing music (like payday2 - Evil eye and etc), can't say that music there is bad, but it may be a lot of better
2. Small and unmemorable story. Well, this game is not for those who love games for good story, this game is about actually playing and shooting everything. The whole campaign might be ended within 3-4 hours (or even less). The good news, devs added endless mods, workshop maps and other stuff to enjoy.

The main hero has the ability to slow down time, also known as bullet time, and a cannon-hand (which we will discuss later). The parkour movements include double jumps, somersaults, roll-ups, and wall sliding. Combining all of these with bullet time makes the gameplay truly captivating.

For example, if you want to pick up your enemy's weapon in mid-flight, be my guest! If you want to send enemies flying with a shotgun, not a problem at all! The possibilities for creative and dynamic gameplay are endless.

But don't be fooled, even since you have bullet time it's very easy to die due to it's limitations (or if you just forget to use it). Severed steel has option to choose difficulty for those who want real challenge or just multiply by 0 all enemies.

I can't say that there are a lot of locations in the game, but the ones that are there look pretty nice to me in a cyberpunk style (although exceptions may be encountered).

The cannon adds an additional mechanic to the game. Not only can you blow up your enemies, but you can also destroy walls, objects, floors, and more. This adds more ways to surprise your enemies and create cinematic kills.

There are also special enemies that cannot be killed in normal ways, as well as different varieties of basic enemies, so you won't get bored.

In conclusion, I want to say that this game deserves to be played. So, grab your mouse and keyboard, and jump into the battle! :D