Severed Reviews
Across Severed’s seven or so hours, you get to experience some of the best touch screen gaming around. DrinkBox Studios have created a great game here with an engaging battle system and art style. It can feel a bit too minimalist in its design, and there’s much repetition in the environments, but DrinkBox Studios have created a great game with an engaging battle system and art style. If you own a Vita, Severed is worth getting.
Severed takes a gimmick in touch-based combat and actually manages to successfully wrap an entertaining game around it. The eerie, ambiguous, yet beautiful, world helps but I found that enough new aspects were added to the combat to keep it interesting until the very end. If this is the Vita’s swansong then it’s going out on a wonderful note.
Drinkbox Studios' Severed is a touch-based action RPG with an interesting premise, incredible visuals, and fun gameplay that simply overstays its welcome a little.
While a touch-focused first person dungeon crawler might sound crazy on paper, Severed's unique brand of combat is as deep as it is engaging. Oh, and the visuals and soundtrack are bonkers to boot.
It’s a shame that Severed came so late in the Vita’s life cycle, because it had me wondering whether or not more games like it could have saved the system. That’s just wishful thinking, of course, so it’ll just have to remain what it is: an incredible eleventh-hour treat for fans who have invested their time and money into the handheld. If you enjoyed Guacamelee!, you’ll find a lot of what you loved in that game has returned. Vibrant colors with a unique “diorama” artstyle really pop off the screen, and its inventive gameplay successfully combines touch-twitch antics and old-fashioned role playing. There may not be enough reasons to shell out for a Vita now, but if there had been more content like this arriving alongside the system back in 2012, we might have seen a very different fate for Sony’s second portable.
Utilizing the Wii U gamepad's touchscreen controls, Severed serves up a fantastic adventure with plenty of engaging swordplay and a healthy dose of monstrous bodily dismemberment. The beautiful art style and a subtly-told melancholy story keeps players absorbed in the bizarre world in between bloody battles and the clever, Zelda-style dungeon puzzles.
A cut, thrust and parry above
While most people have given up on this lovely handheld, I’m glad there are still some studios who are willing to take a chance on the Vita. Severed is a great game with a lot of depth that will have you thinking about it for a long time to come. On a console that is absolutely loaded with the dungeon crawler genre, it's no mean feat that this one manages to stand out.
This is a perfect off-TV experience. While the gameplay premise wears thin over the short adventure, when the slashing combat works and the exploration feels organic, it’s incredible. Just be prepared for a bit of repetition as the story reaches its conclusion.
Severed takes one of the oldest and inaccessible genres in video games and reinvigorates it, giving it much wider appeal than its contemporaries
While I still feel the late-game battles are drawn out with palette swaps and needless complexity, Severed is such a fantastic game otherwise that even with a few warts, Severed is absolutely worth checking out, especially if you missed any of its other releases on Wii U, 3DS, and more.
Severed is a dark and surreal game that, while somewhat repetitive in its gameplay, delivers an overall enjoyable experience, thanks to its fantastic visuals.
No mistakes about it, Severed is the first must own PS Vita title that’s come out in quite some time and if you’re a fan of Drinkbox or simply a fan of fun at all, Severed absolutely deserves a place in your library.
Drenched in a fluorescent colour scheme, Severed, with its intricately designed dungeons, will linger in your memory for a long time to come. There is a chance that, like me, you may tire from the relentless battles, but see it through to its conclusion and you will soon realise that it was all worth it.
Given its brevity, you may dismiss Severed as a game for a rainy, bored day, but don’t. This is one of only a handful of must-plays in the Nintendo Switch library.
Severed is a viciously fun action game, with clever dungeons and awesome combat.
It seems somewhat amazing that Severed exists at all, given the lack of support for the Vita in the west outside of cross platform indie games. It stumbles in a few places, like lack of variety in its enemies, yet the combat system itself is a refreshing take on first person dungeon crawler combat and one of the few fantastic uses of the Vita’s touch screen. It’s a pretty great game and definitely worth dusting off your Vita for.
It’s a fun, simple, good looking game with a surprisingly deep combat system. That said, there isn’t much more to the game besides the occasional dungeon puzzles so if you’re hungry for more, this game might not be for you. If you have the patience for repeated battles while dungeon crawling, then it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find yourself burning hours just swiping at your screen.
Although not perfect, Severed is an enchanting title, an amazing, merge between a Metroidvania and a good old traditional Dungeon-RPG. Behind its minimalist aspect hides an original title, with a great soundtrack that makes you forget the game’s flaws.
Severed is a worthwhile dungeon exploration experience.