With such a fully featured combat system in place Rebel Act would have been quite mad not to include multiplayer in Severance. Thankfully they do appear to have all their marbles intact as Severance does indeed offer a multiplayer feature, and a surprisingly fully featured one at that. There are a decent number of small and nicely varied maps (both in setting and layout) and battling it out with a friend or four is tons of fun. In one particularly cool level, set on a stone pillar in the middle of a volcanic crater, you're presented with the additional challenge of avoiding rising lava by getting to higher ground while continuing the battle. Each of the four characters also has two extra skins in addition to their normal one. There are two minor problems with multiplayer Severance though. Firstly, the classes seem a little unbalanced - for instance an Amazon can slaughter a Barbarian by rushing in and cutting him to shreds with a succession of swift blows before he even manages to get a single hit in. Also, if you accidentally fall to your doom (hence scoring -1) on some levels a few times it can mean that that round becomes a particularly drawn out affair as you struggle to regain a positive score. Stick to same-class battles though and you'll have a great time, although it's obviously not going to take over your obsession with Counter-Strike any time soon.
Severance single player is not without fault either, though. For most of the levels it was certainly great fun, but it slowly started going downhill when I neared the end. As I made my way through the last few levels it almost seems as if the designers ran out of monsters, so I encountered monster after monster that I thought I'd left behind long ago for mightier foes. For example, although the skeletons you'll fight later on are stronger than their counterparts from earlier on in the game, they look the same and have the same attack styles which means things start to get a bit repetitive. For the last two or three levels the monsters were also so hard to kill that each battle degenerated to a point where I was forced to pull off the relevant special attack for that weapon (special attacks require a beat 'em up style key sequence to be pressed and result in a devastating attack), waiting for my stamina bar to recharge and then repeating the process again and again. Why? Because I'm not going to hang around hacking into a monster 50 or so times just to then have to do exactly the same to his best mate in the next room.