Severed Steel will bring style and bullets to PC and consoles this year

You'll flip for the acrobatic shooter's stylish trick system.

If you're like this writer, the first thing on your mind when a new FPS is announced isn't the stunt system, but you're certainly open to the idea of a shooter that merges frenetic gunplay with the sort of grace that belongs under the big top. Which means that, if you're like this writer, you might suddenly find yourself intrigued by the premise of a forthcoming shooter called Severed Steel.

Developed by first-time developer Greylock Studio, Severed Steel is a first-person shooter with a stunt system, no weapon reloads, destructible voxel environments, and a protagonist who lost her arm somewhere along the way. Now she wants revenge, because otherwise there would hardly be a game.

Digerati Games, which will publish the game on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in the third quarter of 2021, notes that its design is inspired by games like Black, Mirror's Edge, F.E.A.R. and a Half-Life mod you might recall: The Specialists. Those influences definitely come through, as "Steel" can wall run, dive, slide and flip with the best of them, while leaving the environments a little worse for wear.

"Steel's residual limb means she can't reload weapons," mentioned today's press release. "When a gun is out of ammo, she must find a replacement, which often means stealing a weapon straight from the hands of an enemy."

Just imagine going to work, dragging along your favorite rifle or pistol or what have you, and suddenly some lady with a mechanical arm is cartwheeling over a table and ripping it out of your hands before you can even shoot her. You'd probably be quite peeved, if she didn't snap your neck in the process or immediately puree your torso with a stream of bullets from your own freaking gun.

Apparently, Steel isn't defenseless even when she empties a clip; she also has a permanent secondary weapon: an arm cannon that can blow holes in just about anything foolish enough (or perhaps stationary enough) to get in her way. Mega Man, eat your heart out!

"I want Severed Steel to give players a feeling of entering a flow state in a chaotic environment," said Matt Larrabee, a former middle-school computer science teacher who apparently decided he felt like learning C++ and then also decided he ought to use that new knowledge to make a violent video game. "I want them to find themselves diving through the air, only a couple rounds left in their magazine, with bullets whizzing by, rockets tearing up the environments, but they feel if they stay sharp they can come out on top."

That sounds like a decent enough experience to us, and it makes us kind of wish we had more teachers like that when we attended middle school.

Severed Steel looks like it could be something special when it launches this summer, what with the stylish combat, destructible environments and even dynamic AI to ensure no two battles are ever exactly the same. Maybe we'll circle back around and tell you more about it once it releases. That does sound like something we might do!

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Staff article by Jason Venter (March 15, 2021) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.