Severance uses an excellent proprietary 3-D engine. The medieval castles and dungeons are beautifully textured and lit. Stone carvings, tapestries and wood panels all look superb and the atmosphere is made startlingly real by the use of lighting effects and shadows. Pick up a torch while you're in the dungeons and you'll see your flickering shadow against the wall in real time, stretching and rotating as you move around. The construction of the monsters and ogres is just as impressive as the environmental graphics.
Tradition dictates they can all be killed by whittling down their life bars.
But to make life a little more interesting, their arms and legs can be lopped off with a good slash of the sword. Sometimes a lucky thrust at the neck will take a head right off. The cool part is that almost every object can be interacted with. You can pick up chairs, goblets, stones and so on to wield as makeshift weapons. In the heat of battle, you can even batter a soldier to death with a severed arm or head.