SEVERED STEEL

This indie FPS is a cut above

Developer Greylock Studio

Publisher Digerati

Format PC, PS4

Origin US

Release Summer (PC), TBA (PS4)

Matt Larrabee had been teaching computer science to middle-schoolers for years when he came up with the idea for Severed Steel. Having picked up an assortment of development skills over time, he began to think about “what my dream game would be,” considering elements from a variety of games he’d loved since childhood. Now we’ve played it, it’s hard to credit the notion that it all came together while Larrabee was on a long, leisurely bike ride; the action here is lean, exciting and blisteringly fast. This is a short, sharp shock of an FPS, one that clearly benefits from having been stripped back from its original form.

Formerly called Impact – until Larrabee realised another game on Steam shared that title, so it had to go – the game was very different at first. “When it started, I pictured these large, sprawling worlds, like Half-Life or Bioshock style, with a lot of physical objectives and puzzles,” he says. “But as time went on, testers were like, ‘The combat’s where it’s at – just give us more of that.’”