To style is to survive.
Severed Steel is a Stylish Parkour First-Person Shooter by Greylock Studio, released in 2021.
The game's Excuse Plot concerns an agent, Steel, who wakes up in a garbage compactor with her arm missing and tears through hordes of EdenSys mooks through her combination of sharpshooting skills, reflexes and acrobatics that allow her to evade enemy fire through slides, dives, flips and Wall Runs.
In addition to the campaign, the game also includes a score based FireFight featuring the levels from the campaign, each with their own sub-challenges and unlockable mutators.
This game provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Steel, missing her lower left arm.
- Arm Cannon: At the end of the campaign's first chapter Steel finds a prototype of such and grafts it onto her missing arm. It has up to three charges of destructive energy that is capable of vaporizing pieces of walls.
- Attack Its Weak Point: The game tells you this verbatim in the campaign level that introduces flamethrower-wielding mooks, who have to be shot in the fuel tanks on their back.
- Bag of Spilling: Any gun that Steel holds when she finishes a level is immediately replaced by a different one when she enters the next area.
- Big Head Mode: Available as one of the unlockable mutators, if you fancy yourself making headshots easier at the cost of score multiplier.
- Bullet Time: Holding RMB (by default) activates bullet time, which consumes a meter that can be replenished by damaging/killing enemies, even over the limit Steel starts a level with. There's a mutator that brings a longer bullet time meter at the cost of not being able to charged. Unless you have superhuman reflexes yourself in real life, it's pretty much mandatory for the game's "stylish combat" as otherwise everything is moving around way too fast for a normal human to keep up with.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": The Hot Lava mutator refers to Steel's health as "luck", as in luck for bullets whizzing past her whenever she isn't doing any evasive moves, in a similar vein to Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway. The health bar being shaped a bit like a clover adds credence to this.
- Combat Parkour: Steel excells at this, being able to slide, run on walls, dive mid-air and even flip upside down mid-air. All of these techniques let her evade bullets.
- Cutting the Knot: Steel's arm cannon allows the player to do this. Instead of navigating your way around rooms and mazes, you can just blast a hole in the wall.
- Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Downplayed, Steel is capable of snatching most sidearms out of enemies holsters.
- Dungeon Bypass: The arm cannon is capable of blasting through walls, which makes it good for either bypassing obstacles or clearing out a wall to an enemy. Certain stages even necessitate this where you're required to use your arm to excavate through a wall.
- Elite Mooks: Elite troops with increased health and speed and better weapons were added in the 3.0 update.
- Enemy Chatter: The radio chatter of the enemies can be overhead, and their launguage as foul as the Replica clones.
- Exploding Barrels: A handful of them can be found in some of the levels.
- Everything Breaks: The game features destructible enviroment which can include walls. The Arm Cannon (and later a Cyber Arm Drill) is the most effective at showcasing this.
- Fast Tunnelling: The penultimate level of the campaign transforms Steel's Arm Cannon into a short-ranged beam that can pierce through walls, which for the final level she uses to escape outside.
- Firing One-Handed: A neccessity given Steel's situation, nonetheless Steel is quite adept at using assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers and even flame throwers one-handed.
- First-Person Ghost: Downplayed, Steel's legs can be seen while sliding or kicking.
- Guns Akimbo: A later updated added the Gravity Arm, which aside from letting Steel grab and toss objects at enemies allows her to use a second gun.
- Harder Than Hard: The "Molten Steel" difficulty, which reduces Steel to a single hitpoint.
- Handicapped Badass: With her incredible acrobatics and aiming skills that lets her blast through her opressors without even a scratch, missing her lower left arm proves to be not much of a hindrance in her mission.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The game has Juggernauts of "lots of armor/hitpoints" kind, and Flamethrower wielding mooks of "hit their weakpoint" kind.
- Hitbox Dissonance: Deliberate in favor for the player. Whenever she's doing either of the wall running, sliding or diving, Steel cannot be hit by most enemies.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From the easiest to hardest: Cold Steel -> Tempered Steel -> Severed Steel -> Sharpened Steel -> Molten Steel.
- Invisibility Cloak: An optional cheat mutator has Steel gain this.
- Level Editor: The game comes with one that's currently in beta as of this edit.
- Limited Loadout: Not counting the Arm Cannon, Steel can only carry a single weapon and has to repeatedly switch.
- Locomotive Level: The game features a level featuring a pair of trains, and in campaign mode the player is tasked with destroying their controls, after which another, armored train would join in and Steel has to destroy its engine. The level is also preceeded with the Train Station level. The 3.0 update added one more level of such type.
- MegaCorp: The enemies are all hired by one known as EdenSys.
- New Game Plus: The game includes this mode which randomized the placement of enemies.
- One-Hit Polykill: A few of the weapons are capable of this, namely the "Ayakashi" laser sniper.
- Quick Melee: There is a kick button, which can be used to disarm foes, or climbing up the walls.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Yeah, whoever severed Steel's hand is out to regret it.
- Rule of Cool: Through Steel's movement mechanics, this game breathes by this trope. The game's executable folder is even named "ThankYouVeryCool".
- Shield-Bearing Mook: The game has this type of mook, which can block bullets. Steel can get around that by (slide) kicking off their shields, or diving past (or ontop) of them and shooting onto their exposed angle.
- Silence Is Golden: Beyond the in-game Enemy Chatter, the campaign's cut-scenes are devoid of any dialogue.
- Slide Attack: Steele has a sliding move that can knock off shields, move past enemies and evade bullets.
- Speed Stripes: The edges of the screen gain this whenever Steel is using any of her special movement options.
- Spider Tank: The climax of the fifth chapter concludes with a boss fight of such, piloted by EdenSys's CEO; this is essentially the game's Climax Boss.
- Stealthy Mook: Some of the levels feature mooks with cloaking devices, that nonetheless slightly expose themselves whenever they shoot.
- Timed Mission: Locomotive Level above is preceeded by the Train Station level, in which Steel has to reach the train in 40 seconds.
- Throw-Away Guns: Steel is not Ethan Winters and therefore cannot reload with a single hand, thus she has to repeatedly scavenge other weapons out of enemies.
- Video Game Dashing: Steel's "Dive" manuever, which is possible to do once mid-air.
- Wall Run: Steel can run on anything that could be called a wall.
