I am going to admit — I picked this game without knowing anything about it. I don't do it so often. I like to research something about a game before buying it — you know, nobody likes to waste time and money on random stuff. Thankfully I wasn't disappointed. It is tons of fun, albeit not without some flaws and misses.

How can I describe the premise of this game in one sentence? Well — imagine Titanfall 2 and Max Payne meet in some run down pub on the saturday night, get few shots of Jack’s Daniels and have passionate hate-♥♥♥♥ in the bathroom stall. Nine months later this game was born — Severed Steel. We have excellent, fluid movement from the first game in all of its glory: wall running, double jumps, sliding, diving forward, vaulting, incredible speed. From the latter title we have bullet time; here works maybe even better than in Max Payne games, because it is not tied to acrobatics (when you use slow mo, Max jumps automatically) , so you have full control over your character, no matter of position and situation — you can even trigger ability when simply walking in straight line, giving you more opportunities in combat.

Add to this almost fully destructible environment — yes, you can blow walls, ceiling, floors, doors and windows — and a really huuuuuge variety of guns (plus rechargeable cannon in place of your character's left arm), put this all together against generic foe and voila! You have Severed Steel.

This game can be boiled down to pure gameplay. It has no story — and I'm dead serious about this statement. There are several cutscenes, but they are more like still, comic book images, without single dialogue. There is no environmental storytelling, because levels are too simplistic and primitive in their design. We don’t know who Steel is, why she lost her arm, why she fights with no named characters, who are her enemies. You can pluck her from the game and put in a different one, and there will be no difference. Same with her foes — this is another bunch of military thugs with guns, without personality and agenda, fighting for yet another big corporation. How many times have we already seen this in other games or movies?

And is this bad? No, not at all, there are plenty of games without a story. But if you produce something that is so bare-bones, why even bother? Why waste time and resources for creating such a generic piece of storytelling? Why pretend? Just put me against bad dudes inside some levels and call it a day. One way or another, devs!

Well, at least the game run great. Which is surprising, considering it using Unreal tech. I was expecting jank, terrible mouse input and problems with performance. But no, all of this is absent here. Game runs great — at least for a majority of cases, because the more the environment is destroyed, which creates debris (chunks of walls, glass, etc) and more bodies are scattered (70+ enemies per level sometimes) the more game lags, but it happens only a few times. Mouse input also is great — I was flawlessly flicking between enemies, tracking them mid air or landing headshots. And FOV… my God, I always will be respecting developers, who set default FOV around 120. Like — yes guys! Thank you for learning the correct lessons! The FOV option should be mandatory in every FPS game.

Okay, now little about flaws. First of all, difficulty. I played a campaign on “regular” hard difficulty, Sharpened Steel. One above — Molten Steel, is a gimmicky glass cannot mode, where you die from one hit. And unfortunately this is yet another case where developers misunderstand punishing and unfairness with high difficulty. It lacks polish and proper balancing. Enemies on hard have pinpoint accuracy and inhuman reaction, and since almost all weapons are hitscanning one, it is mandatory to use bullet time simply to survive encounters. It is even more hilarious when you realize that because levels are destructible and some weapons can pierce through walls, and also because enemies always know where you are, you can get shot without even knowing what hit you. I am not an expert, but I should not be dead in 0,3 second because my pinky toe was visible to some dude with a pistol from 50 meters away. On the top of that add almost no checkpoints through level — yeah, in majority of case (not all) if you die, you need to restart entire level from scratch — and healing and refueling your bullet time bar only when killing enemy, with also have restriction: it works only in 3-4 second intervals, so you cannot spam kill enemies to keep health full.

After playing the regular and bonus campaigns on hard, I decided to play a new game plus on tempered steel — which was a much, much better experience, mainly because it allowed me to learn movements and strategies at my own pace. And my oh my, when the game finally “clicks” in my head, it is so, so much fun — the movement is fluid, so responsive, the gunplay is so much fun. When you pull some more sophisticated stunts or delete 5 enemies in 10 seconds (jump through the windows, headshot mid air, throw weapon in the face of the next enemy, kick another, finish with slide, stealing gun from bad dude holster) you feel like some kind of superhero, like Neo from Matrix. Nothing can stop you, you just dominate the entire battlefield. So my advice — do not touch hard difficulty when doing your first playthrough.

Another flaw is — there is nothing conceptually more in this game. We already talked about the story: it cannot motivate you to push forward. So all your motivation comes from gameplay. Which is killing bad dudes. Objectives in a mission don't matter — destroy this or that, push buttons, etc. — so all you do is kill enemies. Over and over again. There is level, enemies, guns, and… nothing more. Little diversity in gameplay. The only motivation is to kill them in the most spectacular way. You beat the campaign? Good, now New Game+. Do the same but with more enemies. Done? Bonus campaigns now — just do the same. Already beaten? Then Rogue steel mode — eight to ten maps with random debuffs (like floor is lava, headshots only, one bullet in mag etc) and buffs (like big heads) you can pick in a limited pool. Rewards? New skin for Steel or cannon. And you need to grind 26 millions (yes 6 zeros) points to unlock all of the latter. You do this only if you want to have achievements. The gameplay is fun, but it cannot justify how repeatable and grindy it can be. I am going to admit — I put game on cold steel (the easiest difficulty) just to get over this mode.

Firefight 2.0 is — thankfully — better. Mostly because you cannot just turn off your brain and click heads. You need to put effort, because the entire gimmick of this mode is about getting the highest score possible, which can only be acquired by keeping multipliers high all the time. So you need to be fast, precise and do different moves all the time. Basically do not repeat the same move (like dive kill, headshot or kick) twice in the row and you will be golden. I did this mode after all others and accomplished it in two evenings — which means unlocking different canon modes and acquiring S-rank on 30 different maps. It looks hard, but it isn't.

But again, this is all about the same — kill bad dudes. After 30 hours of playing this game, I had enough. This is a fun, simple game, I'm gonna admit — but dear devs, give us something more than the simplest of simple gameplay.

Now. It's over. Go home or something.

For some reason I get a lot of SUPERHOT vibes, and that's great.

try finger but hole?