It’s hard to believe it’s already been nearly nine years since Styx: Shards of Darkness ended on a cliffhanger that had me eager to see what happens next. I love stealth titles, and that one was quite fun to play. I’m happy to say that Styx: Blades of Greed recaptures what made its predecessors so enjoyable while adding new tricks for our favorite foul-mouthed goblin to employ as he hunts down fragments of Quartz to explore his own latent power.
That’s the gist of Blades of Greed, and those new abilities are hard-won, requiring careful manoeuvring through enemy-infested territories and the tactical use of Styx’s skill set to ensure that they don’t see you coming. I mean that literally, as Styx’s martial prowess is restricted to wild slashes with the Greed Blade and a basic dodge that you’re going to have to be very good with if you decide to take on your foes in a fair fight.
“There are references to previous entries in the franchise, and you’re going to want to brush up on the stories of the previous two games to better understand some of the comments Styx makes as he visits new places.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin with the story. It picks up right where the previous game left off, with Styx and Djarak facing off in a duel on Helledryn’s ship even as the golem that he previously took down resurfaces and creates chaos. Styx and Djarak are forced to put their fight on hold in order to face the bigger threat, and things eventually lead to an uneasy alliance between the three returning characters as their ship crashes, and they’re forced to take refuge in The Wall’s slums, biding their time until they can escape it.
The prologue has you tasked with infiltrating a pirate captain’s stronghold in order to request his assistance in escaping the wall. The captain is a dwarf who has a grudge against the Inquisition for confiscating his beloved flying vessel. The ship’s mission to free it does require a touch of audacity, a precursor to the kind of guerrilla tactics you’ll need to employ throughout the game.
Your efforts to release the ship from the hands of the Inquisition quickly put you in touch with a Dwarven engineer whose knowledge of Quartz becomes quite handy later down the line. You now have two new faces to work with, and the early origins of the Black Hand are well underway. The narrative also does well to present events before the beginning of the Great War, an event that fans of Orcs and Men are sure to appreciate in this title. The engineer handles nifty upgrades to your toolkit while the captain is your navigator, using your ship to take you to and fro between the game’s playable areas across the Iserian Continent, many of which will be familiar to those among you who played the previous games.
“The narrative also does well to present events before the beginning of the Great War, an event that fans of Orcs and Men are sure to appreciate in this title”
Each of these regions – The Wall, Turquoise Dawn, and Akenash – is its own sandbox, and has multiple places you get to visit as your powers and skills grow, with backtracking allowing you to flit between available areas as you see fit before new ones open up to you as you progress through the story.
The story only gets better from there, and it’s definitely among the game’s strengths. There are references to previous entries in the franchise, and you’re going to want to brush up on the stories of the previous two games to better understand some of the comments Styx makes as he visits new places.
Moving on to the gameplay, uncovering more of Styx’s strangely symbiotic relationship with the Quartz fragments he’s hunting down requires a lot of painstaking observation and careful navigation as a part of its gameplay loop. Blades of Greed isn’t an easy experience, not by a long shot. Even on easy mode, enemies in an area are quite alert and can hunt you down with an almost disdainful level of skill, which makes the quiet approach almost a necessity right from the get-go. The indicators on enemies give you a good idea of how alert they are to your presence, and the game’s audio cues also tell you quite clearly that they’ve given up their pursuit for the time being.
Cranking up the difficulty only makes things harder, to the point where the challenge can skew towards being a touch unfair. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a patch, but it did force me to play on easy mode in the early hours and switch over to hard once I had a few more tools in my arsenal. I’d recommend quicksaving on every successful kill to avoid being forced to repeat a whole sequence of careful stealthing from the last checkpoint.
“the stealthy approach encourages creativity, with a myriad of ways to mess with your opponent’s head”
Blades of Greed doubles down on the stealth elements of the previous games and supports that with vertical level designs that have a ton of nooks and crannies for Styx to exploit as he tries to remain unseen. You’re encouraged to use every tool at your disposal to turn off lights, crawl under tables, leap up to the ceiling, and attempt to cause accidents using chandeliers and cranes carrying heavy loads.
In the event that you’re spotted, running is almost always the better option as Styx is supremely agile, using his small stature and quick feet to evade danger. Combat is nothing more than a basic attack and dodge combo that you need to exploit, and even basic enemies are far more proficient at it than you are. Styx is meant to strike from the shadows, and the game does not hesitate to drive that point home.
The newly introduced Quartz abilities do offset this to an extent, introducing cool new ways to take the fight to your enemies. For instance, Mind Control makes a return from the first title, allowing you to turn your foes against each other, while abilities like the Flux Blast and Time Shift are great options in a fight. But their effects are too limited to let you actually hold your own in a melee setting, and even then, they are more effective when used from stealth.
However, the stealthy approach encourages creativity, with a myriad of ways to mess with your opponent’s head. You get to throw out clones that can distract enemies, use glass bottles to lure pesky guards to quiet places where you can go in for the kill, and even turn invisible to sneak past a particularly crowded area.
“It soon became second nature to cheese the guards in any area by finding a single safe spot, placing a cocoon that I could teleport back to at will or respawn at if things went south”
The control scheme is built around mobility, allowing you to employ hit-and-run tactics while you improvise in the face of uncertainty. On paper, all of that has the markings of a stealth experience for the ages. But that’s where the cracks in the formula begin to show.
For instance, I found that stabbing a guard in a place where the assassination should have gone undiscovered magically alerted every enemy on the floor, necessitating the need to scramble for cover. I found a suitable hiding spot by crawling through a space, only to find that another guard was able to drag me out of it and quickly give me a rather grisly end.
Upon reloading and attempting a more discreet set of tactics, I found myself in the same situation with the guards hunting me while I hid away in the very same nook. However, I switched things up by hiding to the left of the opening instead of the right, which somehow made the guards overlook my presence. The logic of it escaped me in the moment, but I was grateful for the temporary reprieve.
It soon became second nature to cheese the guards in any area by finding a single safe spot, placing a cocoon that I could teleport back to at will or respawn at if things went south, and then pick and choose my targets while planning an escape route that would have me hiding away at my chosen safe point while they tried their utmost to get to me. The enemy AI could be better, and future updates to the game need to work on making things more believable. But for my time with Blades of Greed, I found the game’s enemies to be an annoyance rather than a challenge.
“The enemy AI could be better, and future updates to the game need to work on making things more believable”
It doesn’t help that your toolkit requires you to use very limited supplies to craft useful items like crossbow bolts, amber, health potions, and lockpicks. Many of these items share the same resources, which makes you choose between one thing and another. I found myself in a situation where I had only a sliver of health left and was forced to choose between crafting a health potion or more bolts to take down enemies from the safety of the shadows.
That’s a choice that I’d welcome if I knew that further supplies were there to be found as I went along, either option facilitating more possibilities. But in the absence of sufficient material drops, choosing either one meant a tedious loop of cat and mouse that should have been fun thanks to its challenge, but ended up being a chore thanks to the fact that you don’t get to use all of Styx’s inventive tools freely enough.
Although that’s offset in the game’s later stages as you get the grappling hook and glider, the latter of which unlocks quite a ways into the story for it to be as appealing as the former, their absence in earlier sections of the game makes the entire adventure too front-loaded for my taste. The majority of my time in Turquoise Dawn, one of the first major areas you get to visit, was spent in a loop of trial and error with many deaths that could have been avoided if only there were more ways to actually enjoy the stealth approach. The grappling hook should have been introduced as early as it could have been, at the very least.
And yet, Blades of Greed’s quirks made finding ways to work around its issues all the more fun. All I had to do was suspend my disbelief just enough for me to start getting very creative with whatever I could use at any given moment. As an example, throwing a clone at an enemy to temporarily stun them while taking down their colleague in one fell swoop is a viable approach, as is laying down an acid trap in the path of a patrolling guard and watching them wither away into oblivion. Throwing up on a rather large guard’s lunch to poison them never got old and was probably my favorite way to take down tough enemies whenever I could.
“The game’s visuals are a big plus, although the cutscenes do suffer from a bit of pop-in and struggle to handle interactions between large assets like your ship and buildings”
Blades of Greed shines in these moments, and it’s all so genuinely enjoyable that I could forget my complaints and settle down for a stealthy gameplay loop that had me lingering in an area long after I collected all the Quartz within its confines just to come up with new ways to be as bothersome as I could be to the enemies in it. It only gets better as you unlock more options via the Upgrades menu, or by finding blueprints to improve on your existing items, thanks to the engineer onboard your ship.
While you might get through the entire adventure fairly quickly if you just make a beeline for the main story, that isn’t how this game is meant to be played. It’s designed around experimentation, and it’s best enjoyed when you stick around long after you’ve picked up all the Quartz in an area to check out exactly what shenanigans you can get up to with your latest upgrades. Overall, I’d say you can clear Blades of Greed in about 20 hours, give or take, and that’s with a sizable chunk of its content under your belt.
The game’s visuals are a big plus, although the cutscenes do suffer from a bit of pop-in and struggle to handle interactions between large assets like your ship and buildings. It doesn’t affect your gameplay, but it can get immersion-breaking to see your ship and a building melded into each other briefly before the game realizes what’s up and forces them apart in real time.
“On the performance front, the game runs quite smoothly at 60fps on a base PS5 when you’re in control of Styx, which is great given how fluid his movements are.”
But while you’re in control, the Unreal Engine 5-powered stages make excellent use of lighting to provide clearly marked safe zones for sneaking while your movements are fluid and smooth, conveying Styx’s supreme agility quite well. The audio is spot-on, too, and you get to hear Styx provide his insights on your actions or the world around him quite often with his signature gruff style of sarcasm and sass.
The guards also give out exclamations when they spot you, the dialogue doing well to convey whether it was just a sighting or if they’re coming to investigate your presence. When they’re hunting you, they often call out to each other, and you can exploit their plans if the situation allows it.
On the performance front, the game runs quite smoothly at 60fps on a base PS5 when you’re in control of Styx, which is great given how fluid his movements are when he’s leaping from ledge to ledge.
“If you’re a fan of the previous games, you’re going to be right at home in this one and even be willing to look past its flaws”
It’s time to tackle the big question: would I recommend Blades of Greed? If you’re a fan of the previous games, you’re going to be right at home in this one and even be willing to look past its flaws. But if you’re a newcomer to the franchise or to stealth games in general, this one comes with a learning curve that you might find discouraging. Get past those initial hurdles, however, and you’re going to have an experience that’s both challenging and just plain fun.
This one’s worth the effort it takes to nail down, and most of its issues feel patchable with a good update or two. Give it a go if you’re a fan of stealth games and want an experience in which your creativity reigns supreme.
This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.
