Depending on what you're looking for in your next third person stealth game, Styx may fit the bill. It gets a lot right and is a noticeable improvement from the first game, which itself was pretty good to begin with. It may not carry the history or prestige of some of stealth's bigger franchises, but if you like the genre at all, Cyanide Studios' latest effort deserves your attention.
Styx, the sneaky, deadly goblin we first met in Master of Shadows in 2014, is back for more stealth action with Shards of Darkness. Developer Cyanide Studios’ second game in their dark-fantasy IP sees Styx doing his thing against humans, Elves, Dwaves, and Roaches in the Unreal4 engine. New abilities and a co-op mode offer new ways to play, and if you enjoy stealth games, there’s a lot to like here.
Styx is a pretty unusual protagonist and he can be somewhat polarizing. Personally, I liked him less than most characters because of his fourth wall breaking insights, which are typically stabs at humor that, eh, don’t often strike a chord. Every time that you die, Styx faces the ‘camera’ and makes a quip about it, and those can earn a grin the first time or two but between that and his in-mission dialog, his character is actually less compelling than you might expect. This is a good as time as any to mention that load times in Styx are pretty darn good, by the way, typically well under ten seconds on a launch PS4.
If you missed out on the first Styx game when it was free on PS+ or Xbox Live Gold, well, it’s still worth picking up, but Shards of Darkness offers a big enough leap in development that if you had to choose, it’s the better game. You need not have played Master of Shadows to fully enjoy Shards, either. A new crafting system allows you to take the objects you find during your mission to create potions for Health and Amber restoration, as well as different weapons like bolts (arrows that Styx throws) or acid traps and the like. A five-part Skill Tree offers lots of compelling paths to customize your playstyle, and I admit I cycled through these Skills many times trying to figure out the best way to spend my hard-earned Skill Points.
The five skill trees are Stealth, Kill, Alchemy, Perception, and Cloning. Note that you cannot expect to survive in Styx very long if you just focus on trying to kill every enemy, that just won’t work. That does mean Styx can’t eliminate foes, he certainly can, but it must be done with stealth or from a distance, with a trap, ideally. Things like the lever to activate alarms can be booby-trapped such that it kills the operator upon use, the acid traps I mentioned earlier are potent, and you can poison food and water sources too. Being able to pop out of a hiding place for a quick kill comes in handy, but be sure to hide the body (you can pick it up and carry it) in one of the many, often conveniently placed hiding spots like open chests and the like.
While having those predator abilities are key, stealth and cloning became my go to upgrade trees. Stealth upgrades include being able to stay invisible longer, make victims next to you invisible, and generally just be quieter. Oh, the dagger Styx uses glows with a cool amber design when you’re well hidden, a smart and reliable indication of how hidden you are. Anyway, the Cloning upgrade path gives you more advanced abilities with the clone that Styx is able to vomit up that allow them to get to harder to reach places, trade places with Styx, and become more deadly. Finally, alchemy gives Styx increased ability to make better potions, lockpicks, and weapons, while perception gives the player yet further acute senses to help you plan your next moves.
Level design is interesting, although similar to most of the characters, does get kind of repetitive. I loved the verticality seen in most levels, and the freedom Styx has to get to places typically through multiple paths, sometimes with taking the long way about or optionally going straight through, using tiny crawling spaces and climbing paths to get to where he’s going. The variety of art design is commendable as well, and while the general feel of the levels kind of blends together, as do the enemies despite their different appearances, there’s enough variety here to keep things interesting in the ten or so missions available.
Each of these story missions can be played in online co-op, which is a first for the series and a welcomed addition. Playing as two goblins can certainly make missions easier, but coordination and cooperation become very important. Getting into a combat situation with Styx typically ends in failure. Styx has a parry mechanism that requires good timing, but missing just a single parry is usually enough to end the game because the enemies deal out massive damage and are quick to pull out their throwing knives if they spot you trying to climb (and even on the default difficulty, their accuracy is spot on). Some Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed games have experimented in some co-op, it’s cool to see Styx do the same here, although it wasn’t a feature I was able to test much so far.
I think my biggest gripe overall is getting invested in it. I think Cyanide Studios did a more robust job this time around making a more developed universe for Styx and players to immerse in, but it still comes across as a mix of generic and lacking to some degree. In other words, I wasn’t as invested in Styx and the storylines in Shards of Darkness and that made the experience more of a grind to work through when the going got tough. I’m not looking for a super deep game here with tons of collectible “audio logs” or scrolls or backstory to find, but taken at face value, and maybe this is just my so-so interest in dark fantasy anyway, I found it difficult to really care about what was going on in the game.
Depending on what you’re looking for in your next third person stealth game, Styx may fit the bill. It gets a lot right and is a noticeable improvement from the first game, which itself was pretty good to begin with. It may not carry the history or prestige of some of stealth’s bigger franchises, but if you like the genre at all, Cyanide Studios’ latest effort deserves your attention.
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