Severed Steel

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

Memember mirrors edge and half-arsed movement mechanist in some other FPS games? Imagine that, but with a heavy focus on combat and art-style that looks like rayonism painting, that looks entirely flat, killing all your depth perception. Even with raytracing there’re no reflections of you. You have no idea if you are moving forward, or if you are hugging an indistinct wall and are shuffling in place. Because these walls don’t look that different from corridors. Especially on black+neon maps with no conventional lighting.

Now add the extra short time to kill on the second difficulty. Thinking that you are cooler than anyone with your sick moves is what makes you die instantly. Especially with this weird gunplay. I never saw anyone who can outrun a bullet. These are not projectile enemies, almost all of them are using hitscan weapons. While you memember Yamakasi and show them your sickest breakdance moves they just shoot you. With guns.

You can’t reload the guns and always run out of ammo, you are supposed to just pick up another one. So you often find yourself in situations when you are unarmed and need to chpok an enemy in melee to steal their gun. But enemies just clip through you and shoot you in the back. The melee combat is the worst part of this game, with how it has no physicality, while it is mandatory and results in most of your deaths.

So in reality this is just a Call of Duty on a higher difficulty, with entirely optional movement system, and with a free wallhack. You camp in place and slowly hunt wallhacked enemies or you die. In my imagination Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare plays something like this.

To put another nail in the coffin of acrobatics — the kinaesthetics suck. Everything is floaty and there’s barely any feedback to your actions. Whatever you press you don’t know if it worked or what. You can’t feel the status of your body.

I just wanted to support a game without disgusting pixels, without lazy roguelite campaign, without low poly.

When you are stuck in corridors against the enemies with hit-scan weapons this is not fun. Especially when the dudes with magic shields, and elite enemies show up. On the semi-open maps where you can easily break the line of sight this feels more like a proper movement game — Mothergunship or Immortal Redneck. There’s wall humping. So you can just run up vertical walls. There’s solid feedback on kill. You can kick wallhacked enemies through the walls and ceilings — since the game allows clipping.

There’s a real campaign mode which you can finish. It has terrible disgusting uncutscenes, which are worse than nothing. The mid-game boss CEO is just box. It stands right there in the room with its nuts wide open. You just stand in one place and kick it in the nads, it does nothing and dies. There are also a stupid angbadang grindathon treadmill game mode with unlocks where you can play with yourself; a roguelite mode which i didn’t touch with a 12.0396 metres pole; a new game plus; some fan campaigns or something. So people who love to do the same thing over and over can probably amuse themselves.

In the first couple of levels the music is nice — it’s some not-boring dnb. But then it’s replaced with generic erotic sounds of butthurt.

All in all it is a mediocre FPS, with sometimes decent movement, and slight destructibility — explosives are rare. At its best it is a 2000s wacky FPS, but on bad maps it’s a bad CoD.