Recent reviews by ClayPlusPlus

I've been waiting patiently for this ever since I picked up the demo a few years ago, and this game is fantastic and has met my expectations! I've seen a bunch of people and reviewers call it an extremely faithful recreation of the original, and if that's true it really goes to show how ahead of its time the original was, and I'm so glad it has been modernized for a newer generation because my god is it glorious. I love exploring the depths of Citadel Station and finding all the cool secrets and audio logs, it is an absolute joy to explore and the feeling of finding things on your own is very rewarding.

+The presentation and atmosphere is so good, each level is unique and varied in the lighting and color palette, something I was a little worried about when I saw the early demos and how blue everything was which fortunately addressed. Enemy designs are also varied and interesting, with Shodan as delightfully evil as ever setting up traps for the hacker.

+Gunplay is pretty good, weapons have good impacts and sounds and I enjoyed experimenting with all the many types of guns scattered around Citadel Station.The gameplay itself is really fun of exploring the station, finding consumables or junk to recycle into scrap and then going to a recycle station to convert them into coins to spend on mods or other consumables, and gunning down minions of Shodan is a blast.

+Puzzles are a fairly decent challenge on Normal difficulty, although one thing that I was a bit confused about early on was some of the puzzle interfaces; some of the critical pieces of information for some of the puzzle pieces themselves are very hard to see and I initially thought one of them was unsolvable for a few minutes until I realized my mistake.

-I did crash on more than one occasion and there were points were I forgot to quicksave and lost a bit of progress when I died, and it can be very easy to get lost; the game mentions why it's designed like that and while I like the idea I found myself looking at the map frequently for places I haven't been to yet and had to reread many files to get the necessary clues to progress. Bring a notepad when you play this game.

-Bosses are hit and miss with the combat and ended up using proxy mines before they spawned in as a way to mitigate the difficulty; you can die very easily in this game, and healing mid-combat is anything but smooth. In fact, a lot of things are a bit clunky to do mid combat; grenades are noticeably difficult to use in combat due to apparently the hackers lack of playing sports as a kid and throws like a malnourished child.

-There are some sections of the game where I don't know if it's a fault of the design or a relic of the past and it can be quite tedious to accomplish some goals in certain areas (I'm looking at you Beta-Grove)

-I wish there were more than 2 upgrades for inventory, cargo lift storage is very small and can barely hold anything (although it is helpful to store a few story-related items in there for later) and I also wish there was a health bay on every level instead of having to go back to either medical or reactor to get a full heal, similar to the battery recharge points.

-The last fight was pretty underwhelming, although I heard/saw it wasn't that great in the original either so I can't fault them for trying to make it better, I was just hoping for a more grand finale.

Despite some flaws, if you are a fan of the original but were too afraid of the dated interface and graphics, this is an amazing and faithful remake of it that I easily recommend!

This game is a good time, it's in the same vein as games like Ultrakill, Get To The Orange Door, and Maximum Action where you can easily achieve the power fantasy of an action movie protagonist. The difference between those games and this one is the fully destructible voxel environment, your one arm plasma cannon that can destroy said environment, and inability to reload weapons, forcing you to be ultra aggressive and literally take guns off of enemies mid air to kill them, all while stylish Drum and Bass music is playing in the background. Weapons are very satisfying to use, with the combat pistol being in my opinion one of the most satisfying weapons in recent memory, and the Samus-like arm cannon is extremely fun to use mid combat.

It's not perfect though, the story is unfortunately virtually non-existent and extremely short (2-3 hr campaign), with brief drawing cutscenes that does not really explain what's going on very well; it's not terrible but it could've been better. Enemy variety is also very sparse and you will here the same voice over and over again, and the areas tend to look the same-y after a while, but they do a fairly good job with the Level Design to make each area unique and fun to traverse.

In conclusion, while it is rough in some areas, Severed Steel is an absolute joy to play and the arcade, leaderboards and speedrunning features make this game very replayable, Highly recommend.

For $20, you get a lot with this game: 4 player local and online coop, custom training for practicing, offline career mode, Steam workshop for custom maps from users, modifiers to change things up every once and a while, a huge player base, continued support from Psyonix with new maps and items, and a core gameplay that's so fun and addicting that "... Just one more game" will become your catchphrase. It's a fun game for the whole family; easy to pickup and play, but has enough depth that makes mastering it worth the first few dozens of hours of feeling like a newborn trying to walk for the first time. The community of the game is huge, with the competitive scene being pretty fierce, and you can find games pretty easily from my experience on standard game modes. I highly recommend giving this game a chance, though I would recommend using a controller for the best time.