When I first got this game, I quite happily installed the huge amount of information on to my hard drive and loaded it up ready to slaughter some arse with a big sword. After looking through the controls, I was ready to go, I chose a character, and got right into the action. After slicing foes left, right and centre, I realised that I hadn't saved it in quite a while. Jabbing the 'F' keys in the hope that one will secure my victory further more, I battled on.

More time passed, once again, I hadn't saved in a while and being a rather meticulous person, I had to make sure that my previous jabbing had bought me a degree of success on the saving aspect. I looked at the controls options again, but to my surprise, there weren't any 'quick save' or 'quick load' buttons. My attempts were in vein.  "Oh well!" I thought, the game must use some sort of auto-save function. Once again, I battled on.

More bad guys got killed, and more blood was shed, but I remained one strong and persistent mofo. I was increasing levels by the minute and my familiarity with the use of the weapons and combo system improved. I was invincible, well, so I thought.

I walked out into a rather open area and up ahead was this big, bad and ugly goblin-type thing that sported one mean sword. My ego powered me as I eagerly shimmered towards the oversized dope. He leapt towards me taking a huge chunk of health off before spinning round lopping my head off like he was using it in some sort of salad. It was all over. It was the first time I had died, and in such a ghastly way.

God bless the auto-save function I thought as my headless body slumped to the ground like a large, man-shaped sack of potatoes. The screen went black for a bit before slamming me right back at the start of the game, miles away from where it'd taken me HOURS to get. I went ape-shit.

After a long period of time where I tried cramming my keyboard into the front of my monitor, I came to my senses and started all over again, but this time with a different character. I re-read the manual with more precision and an angry face only to discover that there is no means of quick saving. You have to escape and save manually.

Now, you might think I'm making a big thing out of this, but it is actually very annoying. Having to take the long route to saving that so many people despise slightly ruins the whole experience. One moment you're charging through a castle running zombies through with your sword, the next moment you're saving. It brings you back to reality better than a slap in the face. It ruins the atmosphere, and atmosphere is one thing that Severance thrives on.

Most of the atmosphere in Severance is created by the graphics, and to be more precise; shadows. It's great looking through a doorway and seeing a huge shadow being cast by an enemy just around the corner. It makes the game much more realistic and gives you slight advantage at various points in the game.

Overall, Severance is an extremely handsome game, although you'll find yourself parading around a multitude of castles, each one is extremely well made and would make the structures that King Arthur lived in look like tents. The things are huge and encompass large quantities of baddies for you to mindlessly slaughter in many brutal and bloody ways.

One down side to many third-person games is that there is no visible damage done to the main character even if they've just had 300 bullets tear through their body and are limping around crying for a medic kit on 3HP. Severance changes this. If you get hit, you'll know about it, not only because your health bar is barely there, but also because you can see great big gashes on the arms, legs and back of your character.

Then there's dismemberment, if an enemy happens to hit you in just the right place, they can make your arm a separate piece of your body. Of course, this kills you because the game would be hard when you've only got one arm.

The baddies aren't the only ones who can have such fun, you can also slice up your foes and if you're skilled, you can down an enemy with one move. Even better though, after you've removed the arm of your rival, you can then pick up the still-warm lump of flesh, and beat the rest of them with it.

In Severance, it's possible to pick up just about anything, if you feel like picking up a stool and lobbing it at your enemy, you can. If you feel like burrowing into the flesh of a zombie knight with a pickaxe, you can. Pretty much everything can be used to beat 7 kinds of crap out of the opposing force. Not only is this fun, it also adds, once again, to the realism of the game.

The control system for Severance works very well, not only have you got the standard slash, but you can perform combos with the addition of the directional buttons to your mouse button poking. There are three types of combo that become accessible throughout the game. At the start, you can perform very simple combos that do a fair bit of damage, but tire you out in a very short amount of time. As you increase in levels, you obtain the ability to execute much more complicated and powerful combos. Minor combos are displayed as a white sword trail, medium-power combos are displayed at a yellow sword trail and the real badass moves are displayed as a red sword trail. Although the power of the later combos increases, they also increase in difficulty. Since I've been playing the game, I've only managed to successfully pull off a red sword trail combo once, but still, I didn't know what buttons I pressed in the first place so there was no chance of repeating it.

Combos are very useful, if you can manage to pull 'em off. Once you start a combo, there's no stopping it, or changing direction mid-flow. So if you start a combo when the enemy isn't in the way, not only is it a waste of energy, but you're open to attacks.

Of course, what's a good game if it hasn't got good sound effects? Yet another area where Severance excels is its sound effects. From throwing stools at a wall to firing an arrow into the face of an orc, everything sounds great. On top of this, there's the background music, and I emphasize the 'background' part. While playing Severance, you won't have time to listen to the music; you'll be too concerned with having to fight a boss with only a third of your total hit-points. Believe me, it'll happen a lot.

That leads me onto my first criticism in the whole review. When you reach the latter parts of the game, you seem to be fighting boss after boss after boss. As soon as you kill one, you start on another. It gets extremely frustration as most bosses take multiple attempts to overcome. At the moment of writing this review, I'm stuck on a boss with a VERY small amount of health, I've tried many times to kill him, but the state I'm in is prohibiting me from advancing further.

Although the AI in Severance appears to have super-vision, overall, it's okay. It's by no means the best, but it's not terrible either. To be honest, you're fighting Orcs and zombies and as far as I'm concerned, these things didn't go to universe, study for a degree and then get a job calculating the trajectories of Space shuttles for NASA. They're meant to be stupid, and as far as zombies go, these ones are quite stupid. They use normal attacks, they use combos and they dodge, some are not easy to kill, but others are. The AI is adequate. It doesn't ruin the game by being overly stupid.

From what I've gathered, the multiplayer side of Severance is pretty crap, there are next to no servers and to be honest, it doesn't do anything new. You've got all the usual game modes, you know; Deathmatch etc, and that's pretty much it, nothing new, nothing stylish. It's basically playing a level of the single player over and over again with real people as your enemies! Although this isn't going to stunt the final score, it would've been nice to see some new kind of play, or new weapons, just something new! In fact, I think the sales of the game would've benefited if Codemasters concentrated more on the single-player game rather than adding a half-arsed multiplayer side.

In summary, Severance: Blade of Darkness is well worth £10 or $10, whatever! It looks brilliant, there's an excellent variation in weapons and it is most definitely a challenge. If you don't play this sort of game much, expect this baby to last you quite a while.

If you're looking for a good old Hack 'N' Slash romp, then I highly suggest Severance. It's not exactly much of a strain on the wallet, so what are you waiting for?

-Adam