Styx: Master of Shadows
Developer: Cyanide Studio
Price: $30
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for the game
Cyanide Studios introduced players to Styx the sneaky goblin in their 2012 game Of Orcs and Men, and this time they’re taking us back a few years to give us a prequel focusing on the origins of Styx.
What Styx: Master of Shadows nails right from start is its world design. The levels are just gorgeous and while they’re nothing particularly new to anyone familiar with the fantasy setting it’s all so pretty you won’t really care. Although as nice as the levels look, the game has this weird effect whenever you’re moving the camera where everything is constantly popping in quickly with these white flashes. It’s really notable, ugly, and totally kills the vibe. Styx himself is a humorous enough character as he makes his way to stealing the heart of the world tree and you’ll take him through each stage gathering the things he needs to pull off the big heist. The idea of a heist game in a fantasy setting is really neat but the story and characters aren’t particularly engaging which leaves you with just the gameplay to give a shit about as you sneak throughout the game.
Being a tiny goblin, Styx isn’t exactly the most durable person ever so bursting into the castle guns blazing isn’t his idea of a great plan so sneaking is what you’ll be doing throughout the game. You’ll spend most of the game hugging cover, hiding in shadows, and generally avoiding the soldiers who don’t take too kindly to goblins sneaking around their castle. Styx of course isn’t a normal goblin (because why would you ever play as a normal anything in a game) and has special powers fueled by a substance called amber. Activating these abilities will allow you to turn invisible, give you a sort of detective vision like in the Batman: Arkham series, or create a clone. Clones are particularly useful since you can use them to explode into smoke to blind enemies, lead guards away from an area, latch themselves onto an enemy until it’s pulled off by another guard, or hide in a closet to kill the next person to walk by.
It’d be silly performing a heist without some tools which Styx has surprisingly little of. Besides the typical health/mana potions you’ve got sand to extinguish lights from a distance, throwing knives, and acid to disintegrate bodies. The knives are super useful but I rarely needed to use the sand and the acid is unnecessary since you can leave an enemy in a dark corner of a room and he’ll never be found since guards stick to their specific patrols. It’s kind of a bummer playing a stealth game with a serious lack of variety in the ways you sneak around.
The game also features a skill point system that rewards you for completing main or side objectives. When you return to your hideout in-between missions you can then spend these points on various upgrades for Styx like increasing his item limit, learning new clone skills, or unlocking cover kills.
There’s a certain thrill to playing the game when everything’s going right as you scurry past guards, roll under tables at the last possible moment for cover, or scaling walls to continue your trek in the rafters above. When the game hits its mark it’s a blast but that fun quickly dissipates when the game’s problems poke their heads out of their holes.
As great as the levels look the game unfortunately sort of gives the impression of having these grand open levels when in reality they’re just super linear. You’ll enter an area and see this huge space below thinking “Wow, I can’t wait to explore every nook and cranny” only to find out that every single one of those nooks is empty. There’s absolutely no reason for you to go off the beaten path unless you’re hunting for the collectible coins and even then most of them are found on your path to the objective. Even the side quests are almost always on the main objective path which seems sorta silly to do.
The core concept of the game is great, it really is, but it’s sorely lacking in variety causing repetition to kick in way too early than it should. The floaty jumping controls don’t help matters either with Styx making jumping in LittleBigPlanet look precise. I never felt confident jumping and that’s not a good feeling to have when you’re playing a stealth game with a heavy emphasis on vertical traversal. Many times I’d go for an easy jump only for Styx to not grab the ledge for whatever reason or fall just short of reaching it due to the clunky jumping controls and either fall to my death or in the middle of a pack of soldiers. Don’t even get me started on dropping onto ledges, or should I say Styx’s inability to do so. If you want to drop onto a ledge you have to sort of hobble yourself over the edge and pray Styx grabs onto it as he falls. You’re also unable to turn corners when hanging on a ledge for some mind boggling reason.
Styx might be a master of shadows but he’s completely incompetent when it comes to swordplay which is unfortunately where the game starts to fall apart. Getting seen means an almost immediate death as every guard in the vicinity rushes over to introduce your ass to their boot. If one gets close enough to you then the game will lock you into combat mode where you’re basically forced to fight back since the camera stays locked on the enemy even if you try escaping. You hardly do much in the combat anyway since you have to hit the attack button at the exact moment to parry and then you can perform an execution. Simply slashing away will get you killed and missing your parry will get you killed so you’ve got to make sure you get the timing down pat. Combat is already annoying enough with a single enemy so imagine how frustrating it can get with multiple enemies slashing at you while you’re locked into fighting a single guy. Oh yea, and some guards will chill in the back shooting stuff at you while you’re locked into combat just to make things even shittier. There’s almost always no point in attempting the combat since you’ll usually die from how clumsy it is. I get that Styx is weak and should go down in 2-3 hits, but if that’s the case then you should at least be given some proper combat mechanics or some way to easily break away from combat like a smoke bomb or something. Instead, your only options are to try to get through it or reload your save. I honestly wouldn’t have minded dying so much if it wasn’t for that 30+ second (I counted) loading screen you have to sit through each time you bite it and trust me you’ll be seeing it a lot. What’s even weirder about the combat is how the game offers an entire skill tree dedicated to combat skills when there’s absolutely no reason to ever want to fight someone.
The Final Word
There’s a brilliant game hidden deep inside Styx: Master of Shadows but a lack of item variety, shoddy controls, and a horrid combat system keep its potential buried deep.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Mediocre
