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Gamescom2015: Guacamelee dev's Severed is part Fruit Ninja, part Metroidvania, part dungeon crawler

Grind and chop

Gamescom2015: Guacamelee dev's Severed is part Fruit Ninja, part Metroidvania, part dungeon crawler
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Going on the vibrant Latin American aesthetic of its games, you wouldn't think that DrinkBox Studios is based in Canada. Its previous game Guacamelee! was a riot of flamenco wrestler theatrics, and the studio's next title, Severed, has the same colourful vibe.

You play as a young woman with a sword, hacking her way through a monster-filled landscape of rubble and ruin, gradually learning what the hell is going on.

The gameplay is part first-person grid based dungeon crawler, with rooms that you can navigate in Year Walk-esque layers; part Metroidvania; and part Fruit Ninja. You navigate the world by tipping the L stick left or right to rotate your view, and forwards to advance when a path is available.

Sometimes the paths are blocked by weird gloopy monsters that you can dispatch with a few slashes across the screen. Other monsters - circle-mouthed ragworm things, mutated monkey-spiders, trees that develop deadly spores - materialise in the rooms that you enter and start periodically attacking you.

To kill these you need to parry their blows with a swipe in the direction in which they're about to attack you and then slash at their exposed parts. Each successful slash builds up your sword meter, and once it's full you can tap an enemy to enter sever mode, letting you slash off as many limbs as you can in a frozen moment of carnage.

Arms for the poor

The limbs that you slash off constitute the currency with which you buy upgrades. In the build I played there were only three categories of upgrade available - health, damage, and sever time.

However, the variety of enemy types I saw in my brief hands-on at Gamescom was promising.

Some monsters require timing, while others - like the floating eye that appears in an empty row of a grid of sword-blunting blocks - require accuracy, and you soon end up fighting two or more at a time, flipping between the viewpoints by tapping icons at the bottom of the screen which change to indicate the imminence of the threat.

Bosses, meanwhile, yield totems - severed body parts, basically - that you wear to give you extra powers.

The version I played isn't complete. Nor is it even the most current pre-release build. DrinkBox told me that the latest version lets you enter sever mode at the end of every fight, increasing the speed at which you collect limbs. The studio has also created a far more complex upgrade tree on which to spend those limbs.

On the basis of what I did play, however, Severed has a lot of promise as a slightly surreal genre mash-up with elements of games new and old. You'll be able to play it for yourself when it comes to PS Vita early next year.

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Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.