This might be the most fun I've had with a shooter in over a decade. It's that good. Greylock Studio has figured out the thing other "acrobat shooters" have struggled with for years. How do you incentivize a player to use the flashy acrobatics and stunts? Almost all the stunt moves in this game commit the player to take huge risks, require some forethought about positioning and travel, are demanding of player skill, and make accurate aiming more difficult. Severed Steel takes the acrobatic systems pioneered by predecessor games like Max Payne 2 and Titanfall 2 and dials them up to 11, by building the entire gameplay incentive structure around doing stunts.

When you're stunting, you are invulnerable to all damage. When you slide and dive aggressively into the enemy, you can immediately yoink their weapons (even while they're alive) to stay in the fight longer. Executing a dive will automatically give you slow-mo to use even if you had just run out of it a second ago. And doing a backflip makes your slow-mo even slower. The arm cannon is a perfect fit for the destructible voxel environments and makes sure you aren't totally bound by the level design. Not only can it be used to make your own dynamic entries into rooms or take shortcuts, but a quick shot of it can keep your dive or slide from getting stopped by a wall.

This game is just stuffed to the brim with really good design choices like this. The story is barely there, but it doesn't matter at all when the sound design, gameplay loop, effects, and music are just so well done. There's a lengthy campaign, with an arcade mode with a huge selection of weapons, difficulties, mutators (including Big Head mode!), with workshop support as the shining cherry on top.

I can't recommend this game enough. Those videos you're watching in the Store Page gallery are not bull-shots of the game. I would even say they are an understatement compared to the crazy *$%# you can actually do in this game. I bought this game on sale but I would happily buy it once again at full price. Get it, enjoy it, marvel in its beauty.