XBOX REVIEW | Styx: Blades of Greed

Can you believe that Styx: Master of Shadows and Styx: Shards of Darkness only had two years between their releases? It seemed like we’d never get a third entry, but after nine years, Styx: Blades of Greed is finally among us. The question is: was the long wait worth it, or did Styx not need to be brought back?

Things I liked!

• Accessibility | There are three types of colour vision deficiency corrections to choose from if needed: Deuteranopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia, and you can also set the intensity of your colour deficiency, which I thought was a nice feature to see. Additionally, eleven languages are available for selection: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese, ensuring ample accessibility options.

• It’s all interconnected | There are three open areas available: The Wall, which is an Inquisition-populated area with lots of guards and workers and a few beetles around, and in later acts, Orcs are also present. Turquoise Dawn is a swamp area with many dangerous beetles and a few guards and humans, and in later acts, it has Orcs and the Inquisition as well. The Akenash Ruins is an area that is at first filled with poisonous plants and goblins, but in later acts, it also has regular and amber-infected elves, as well as the Inquisition showing up. These areas are pretty big, and they all have many paths available for the player to explore.
  
  With new gadgets like a glider that was originally crafted for dwarves, a grappling hook, an item that gives you the ability to pass through gates and a claw acquired thanks to your inventor companion, Jasper, you can also explore new places in these areas and traverse them more quickly. Styx is very swift and moves around quite efficiently, making traversal feel quite good. You can also quick save at any time simply by pressing the left trigger, which made everything so much smoother and easier.

• How do we do this? | There are many options on how to kill enemies, old ones and new ones as well. There are the regular silent but slow assassinations, and the quick but noisy ones. You can poison food with your vomit, kill enemies with a jump assassination, pull or push them from ledges, shoot them with darts, use acid traps, drop something heavy on their heads, kill them with your clone, and use other returning and new skills to kill them as well.

• Skills | There are plenty of skills available to learn; they are divided into amber skills, quartz skills, and items and prototypes you acquire and upgrade throughout your adventure.
  
  Amber skills should be familiar to Styx players, as they include invisibility; creating a clone; throwing clones onto enemies, hiding places and objects; cocoon crafting, which I never used, but by its description, it sounds like a spawn point of sorts, meaning you can die and come back in it, I chose the “save-scumming” way instead, as I always like to do in stealth games. You can upgrade your amber vision to see enemies through walls and more, and assassination mastery to let you instantly hide enemies you kill from hiding places.
  
  Items and prototypes can only be unlocked and upgraded by using blueprints you find scattered throughout the maps, with only one of the upgradeable ones being unlocked by progressing in the main story: the grappling hook, which was extremely useful for traversing around. In this section, you can upgrade your space for resources, darts, amber and health vials, make them more efficient, craft acid traps, and upgrade your lockpicking ability speed.
  
  The most exciting and potentially game-changing skills are the quartz skills. They let you mind-control an enemy for a short duration, even making them jump to their deaths when upgraded; Time-shift, which makes you somewhat like The Flash, for when it’s active, letting you traverse unseen, or approach an enemy to kill them easier; Goblin reflexes lets you evade incoming attacks and even lets you deflect incoming projectiles back to the attacker when upgraded; and there’s also the Flux Blast, which basically acts as a force push from Star Wars, letting you push enemies that aren’t big.

• Much to collect | There are plenty of collectables scattered around the maps; some of them are tied to side quests given by your companions. They all give you experience when collected, and even show up in Styx’s bedroom in the zeppelin. There are also runes, which are also revealed by your companions, that can be acquired. They give you certain advantages, such as making other runes highlighted by your amber vision through walls, making other collectables visible through walls, and getting more resources when looting. Speaking of resources, there are plenty of those around, and you use them to craft amber and health vials, acid vials, acid traps, lockpicks, darts, and cocoons. I hardly ever got in trouble for not having enough resources.

• Soundtrack | The soundtrack in Styx: Blades of Greed is very well made, giving the game the proper dark tone of its universe. Violins are persistent and very intense, with drums showing up sometimes as well. The main track of Turquoise Dawn was the only one that got me somewhat tired of it, but it did fit the jungle atmosphere nicely.

• Enemy variety | There are plenty of enemies to kill or avoid in Styx: Blades of Greed. Human enemies consist of regular guards that can be killed without much effort; armoured guards that either have to have their armour removed before stabbing them or can be killed with poison, acid traps, mind‑control suicide, or something heavy falling on their heads; big guards that can be killed the same way as armoured guards, and they come in armoured or unarmoured varieties; humans that can neglect your abilities in an area, forcing you to kill or avoid them without them; human workers that run and call for nearby help.
  
  There are also beetles; ‘armoured’ beetles that force you to either wait for them to open their wings to stab them or engage them in close combat; giant beetles that have to be engaged in close combat, forcing you to avoid their attacks and stab them when the time is right multiple times to kill them, and they can also be killed with darts; beetle swarms that slowly kill you if you stand in them.
  
  Amber‑infected goblins are back; they could have nothing special about them or be explosive when dead. Elves also return, with amber‑infected ones that can detect you a lot easier by smelling you, and regular elves with the same variety as human enemies, except for the big ones and the ability‑denying ones. There’s an enemy that I can’t exactly describe what it is, but it’s some sort of tentacle with a sting.
  
  Orcs are back again, and they come in regular varieties, shaman ones, or a specific one at one point that absorbs a quartz shard and has to be damaged a few times before death. It’s best to avoid them in general as much as possible, as they are deadly and quite resistant.
  
  And finally, there are the bosses: the Queen of Roabies that Styx has fought already in Styx: Shards of Darkness, which you have to avoid while destroying quartz crystals powering her shield, so you can absorb a shard of quartz from her, and the Mother Earth‑possessed Priest Geoffrei from the Inquisition, both being fairly simple to defeat.

Mixed & disliked!

• Technicalities | Unfortunately, I ran into a few bugs while playing Styx, even after it got updated on February 9th. Lighting had a lot of problems before the update, with rays of light going through rooms constantly and even having a smoke‑like effect, which I assume was bloom cranked way too high. Thankfully, these issues diminished with the update, but they still showed up every now and then, just not as frequently. I also saw a tablecloth not being properly placed, meaning it was floating under the table instead of being on it. The game had some framerate issues in a specific cutscene when the zeppelin that becomes your main base starts moving for the first time, but the framerate seemed to drop almost every time I loaded a save file as well. Another problem I had was that Styx seemed to repeat something he had just said about an objective he had just reached, and this happened a few times.
  
  The environment could also get in the way sometimes, with enemies walking normally through irregular terrain that Styx had to jump to get over. There was a visual bug that didn’t show that I collected a piece of quartz, but it thankfully didn’t stop me from progressing. In one instance, when I got back to the zeppelin, Jasper was invisible; I only knew she was there because I could hear her working and talk to her. There was also an instance where an enemy goblin tried to go in the direction I was after losing sight of me and just fell to his death into the abyss. It was pretty hilarious, but an obvious flaw on the AI’s part.

• A mixed story | I thought that the main plot in Styx: Blades of Greed started pretty vaguely, with Styx simply going after quartz to become more powerful, but it developed well enough, forcing him, a selfish thief, to work with other people and face a greater evil that could end the world. Every time Styx absorbs a quartz shard, a strange voice talks to him, and in the end, that voice is Mother Earth, who wants to destroy everything, as the world is off balance. Of course, it’s up to you to stop her, risking your life in the process. However, the subplots felt underdeveloped, like the Inquisition using bell chimes to control people being revealed later on, and Styx wanting to stop them by sabotaging the bells, conveniently in the same area he discovers this in. Granted, it was a pretty big area of The Wall, but it didn’t really convince me.

• Characters | I also thought that the main characters were a mixed bag, with returning and already established characters like Helledryn and Djarak, and new ones like Irving, who pilots your zeppelin base, a dwarf inventor and blacksmith called Jasper, and an orc shaman called Wren.
  
  Helledryn is your typical hot‑headed captain, but she seemed decently developed, as she was already present in Styx: Shards of Darkness, being a former captain of a group that killed off goblins to protect human empire citizens. Djarak is a former enemy elf who can shift his appearance to disguise himself; he doesn’t talk much and feels somewhat bland at times. Irving seems to only exist to pilot your ship, as he is the captain of it. I didn’t quite follow why he remained a part of the crew, as he was the one who interacted the least with everyone. Jasper wanted to experiment with Styx, discover what the quartz was doing to him, and develop gadgets that helped him out. She seems to be somewhat blunt, tells stories, and jokes around sometimes, and her purpose in the crew was clear. Styx finds Wren in the Turquoise Dawn, and she joins the crew, worried that Styx shouldn’t mess with quartz, as it is a part of Mother Earth, and it could bring everyone to ruin. Turns out she wasn’t too far off. Of course, our protagonist Styx had to be the best character, as he is the most developed one, since this is his third entry. Styx is the one who swears the most and has some dark humour as well, as expected.

• I can’t hear you | There was a feeling of quietness I felt when I first started playing that was a bit out of place. Sure, a stealth game has a quietness to it, but having enemies not scream or noisily react when stabbed, pushed or pulled from balconies, poisoned, hitting an acid trap, or whatever else happens to them feels out of place. However, I’m pretty sure this was made to justify other enemies not hearing their deaths. The remaining sound effects were very nicely done and fit everything that was happening pretty well.

• Too long | I felt that having five acts was not a great idea. Exploring different areas of the same maps was actually nice, but the game felt way too long, forcing you to collect quartz every act to progress and keep doing the same thing with a few different objectives sprinkled in between them. It would’ve been a good idea to either make it a shorter game or have more objective variety to make things more interesting for the player.

How long did I play the game before publishing the review? About 29 hours
How long to beat the story? 26h-29h
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 20/44 OR 359g/1000G
How long to achieve 1000G | 30h-40h
You’ll love this game if you like these | Styx: Master of Shadows, Styx: Shards of Darkness.

CONCLUSION

Score: 75/100

Despite having experienced quite a few issues, none of them were game-breaking. So Styx: Blades of Greed still feels like a solid entry to the franchise. With a good soundtrack, great gameplay, and a decent main story, there’s no going wrong with it if you enjoyed previous entries or like stealth games in general.