Around a month ago I played some Superhot and I'm continuing the trend of stylish parkour FPSes with minimalist aesthetics with the excellent Severed Steel. Beyond a few dialogue-free cutscenes, you're told very little about this cyberpunk world or your role in same as a one-armed woman left for dead by security forces, beyond that those same forces are now looking to destroy the rest of you and you're determined not to let that happen. Severed Steel is an FPS that absolutely prioritizes speed above all else, with perhaps brief moments to consider strategizing and defensive maneuvers, and places that relentless momentum at the core of some thematically-fitting neon-soaked lo-poly visuals, an EDM soundtrack that aims to sooth more often than rouse, and an overall breezy arcade mentality that feels like it wouldn't be out of place in the 1980s if they had anywhere near the tech back then to pull this off.

Severed Steel is also an ingeniously-designed shooter in much the same way the recent Doom reboot was, with various interlocking systems that feed into one another and ensure your long-term survival as long as you can keep a cool head to remember all the techniques and their associated function keys you'll be using in tandem or consecutively. The protagonist is entirely too squishy and will die in five hits, while enemies are extremely fast and extremely accurate so those five hits will vanish in an instant once you're locked in their sights. However, you have two advantages (and later a third): the first is the ability to slow time by holding the right mouse button (if playing M&K style, and why wouldn't you?) which allows you to carefully aim shots or use evasive tactics to escape a real bad situation, and the second being your acrobatics which renders you temporarily invulnerable whenever you're running across a wall, sliding across the ground, or flipping through the air. It's the combination of the two as you quickly enter states of invulnerability that you can stretch out for as long as you need that allows you to control the battlefield, and every enemy defeated restores one of your HP and a small segment of the slowdown ability, so as long as you keep taking lives you can keep running around in slow-mo being an invincible parkour angel of death.

Early in the campaign, your repertoire is enhanced further by acquiring a Mega Man-style blaster arm to replace the one you lost: this works as an effective if slow gun if your other hand is empty, and can also deform the environment if you want to create a hole in a wall to shoot enemies through or eliminate the ground beneath their feet to let gravity do your job for you. Though finite, the slowdown really helps you figure out which of these many abilities and traversal techniques would be best suited for the current encounter. Guns-wise, because you only have the one working arm, you can't reload anything you pick up nor can you effectively use their iron sights. Instead, you pick up guns, fire them until their magazines are spent, and then toss it to pick up whatever gun your recently deceased nemeses have dropped to keep the flow going. As the flow is important to the game's approach, you'll automatically grab new guns if your own is out and trying to fire an empty gun will have you throwing it as hard as you can, which can often be enough to finish off anyone in its trajectory. Finally, you have a trusty kick, which can stun or finish off enemies as well as open doors very, very hard (and woe betide anyone standing on the other side).

Despite the fact you're having to be conscious of about ten different buttons—WASD for movement, left mouse shoots, right mouse slows time, middle mouse fires your cannon arm, control drops you into a crouch (or a slide if you're moving), the E for kicks (given the game's vibe, taking E for kicks seems very apropos), and space lets you jump and double-jump—all of which you'll be hitting a lot, often simultaneously, it's never quite as overwhelming as you'd expect. I played on the recommended difficulty setting, the middle of five, and though I died a considerable amount it was usually only because I'd allowed myself to get complacent after gunning down so many enemies and letting my slow-motion run dry or getting too close to an enemy group to aim at them effectively. The simple act of sliding and shooting while in slowdown was often enough to dispatch many foes with minimal effort, though you'll meet a few that require getting around them like those holding up riot shields (kicks work well against them too, though getting that close when they're shooting you isn't always painless).

It's a game that forces you to think on your feet, as well as use them, as you sort of subconsciously dance to its beat. It also makes you feel like a badass while doing so; besides the thematically and visually similar Superhot the next closest point of comparison, at least of the games I've played, is Platinum's Vanquish from way back in the day (or perhaps, for a more recent example that I haven't played, Neon White). That sort of "screw cover and taking things slowly" iconoclastic attitude towards the FPS genre in its modern form that instead rewards big risks and a mental alacrity few genres outside of infamously tough bullet hell shooters and rhythm games can sharpen. Even though I have the old man reflexes these days, it was exhilarating trying to keep up with the game and in the end my protagonist successfully wandered out of that electronic dystopian hellscape a free woman, albeit not without a few dents and bruises from trying to slide-jump out of a skyscraper window through another skyscraper window to get the drop on a dude with a jetpack. Just a usual Friday night.

Rating: 5 out of 5.