Severed Steel Review

Severed Steel is a first-person shooter that provides an eclectic mix of bullet time shenanigans, parkour movement and striking visuals wrapped in a banging electronic music tortilla wrap that delivers an enjoyable action packed burrito which would challenge even the most hardened of players.

You play as an unknown female protagonist, waking up with one of your arms missing. This is a key component to the gameplay, as every weapon you pick up from the varied arsenal the game provides will only be wielded with one hand.
You journey through multiple levels, learning more about what is going on via comic book style intermissions between each chapter. At one point you gain a Samus Aran style arm cannon, granting you the ability to fire off balls of death, which can easily deform the level geometry.

This is as much story as I could glean from my time with the game and that surface level lack of narrative definitely leaves a lot to the player’s interpretation to fill in the blanks of the core story of Severed Steel.

Each level is relatively short and you can blast through the campaign in a handful of hours, providing you’re able to survive. Running around like this is a standard FPS and you’re likely to kick the bucket quite often as our protagonist is fragile with a small amount of health.
The aforementioned parkour movement is how you’ll survive; double jumping, diving, sliding and wall running will provide moments of invulnerability from bullets.

While you are dancing around these levels like a teflon coated weasel, you can also deploy your generous reserves of bullet time. This resource can last around 15 seconds or so, with your kills replenishing a portion of this timer; as such, the more adept you become at chaining your kills together, the more time you’ll be able to spend in slow motion, ultimately increasing your survival rate.

You’ll be encountering a fairly varied assortment of soldiers as you decimate each level with silky prowess. Ranging from your standard fodder, armed with pistols and submachine guns, riot shield wielding tossers and jet-pack laden plebs, to more heavily armoured goons that can only be downed by hitting their weak points.

The arm cannon I mentioned earlier can easily change up how you tackle a level as it literally opens up new strategies for you to adopt. Can’t figure out which way to go? Then simply blow a hole in the floor/wall/ceiling and create your own path to the exit.
While you are limited to three rounds with the cannon, you can replenish the ammo after defeating certain enemies, as your cannon will visually leech rounds from the fallen bodies when it looks like you’re firing lightning from it. This happens automatically and with the action being so frantic, I couldn’t tell you exactly which enemies provided the ammo recharge.

While many may turn their nose up at the short campaign, it is just one portion of the burrito that is on offer. Attempting to blast through that in each of the five difficulty levels the game presents, provides plenty of replayability and it doesn’t end there.
“Firefight” mode offers you even more carnage, with challenges to complete within the levels that are on offer there, with the option to download Steam workshop levels created by the community, as we have a handy dandy level editor built into the game.

This opens up the game to potentially unlimited content, with people creating their own fiendish levels for us unsuspecting players. With this being an option in the game, any issues I had with the short campaign were immediately thrown out the window, as I also had access to a good 30+ levels to tackle here too.

The visuals have a distinct look to them, ranging from subtle whites and reds, feeling quite sterile and pristine to wild neon and metallic surfaces, reflecting all the lights into your eyeballs. Switching on RTX, if you have a card capable of such goodness, just raises the whole lighting of metallic surfaces to another level.
I will admit, at times, these visuals can become a tad overwhelming and they did disorient me when encountering some close proximity explosions that destroyed part of the level itself. Thankfully the options available allow you to tailor, to some extent, how subdued or in your face you want the visuals to be.

Overall, Severed Steel is a title I feel that I’ll keep returning to, trying to better my times in the campaign while also seeing what wonderful levels the community are going to create. For costing just under £20, it’s an absolute bargain. It’s also a title I hope the speedrunning community picks up, just so I can see how badly they can break the game in their quest for saving those frames.