Styx released in 2014 and was a super quiet release. Had it not been for an Xbox Live sale, I wouldn't have noticed this game until it entered the Games With Gold program. It's a prequel to Of Orcs and Men, another game I know nothing about or managed to get to play. It's a stealth game, so I had to give it my money.
We play as Styx, a master thief, who's also a little green goblin. He has abilities to create clones, turn invisible and use amber vision, which highlights enemies and items. Super handy tools when it comes to stealthing through the tower of Arkanash. The tower is seemingly built in the sky, it's so high up and it has an infinite drop that descends in to grey clouds. It's a great place to dispose of bodies when you're near the edge, can't be leaving bodies around unless you want to get detected.
The opening cutscene is beautiful, it looks great. But that's it, from then one we're giving stills with dialogue, but they were nicely presented at least. The graphics are OK, not great like, the voice acting isn't the best either, but the performances were funny, I liked them. Being able to distinguish torches or with balls of sand from afar was a great way of creating cover and I did it as much as I could, enemies would light torches back up if they were near when they went out. You have a tattoo on your back that lights up when you're unlikely to get detected, this was a huge help in knowing whether you were safe.
There was a lot of ways to stay stealthy too, you could land on carpets from drops to cover the sound. You could hide bodies in boxes and even make them disappear completely using acid. Using your special abilities comes at a price, you need amber, which is a potion that can crop up through your missions. Each power takes down your amber bar until you replenish it. You could also do quiet kills, if you snuck up on an enemy, you could do a quick kill that or would make a lot of noise or do a silent kill which took longer.
There weren't a lot of missions but, each one was split into a few parts. This really broke up the missions and didn't make them feel like they dragged. The loads times were ridiculously long and were a huge reason why it took me so long to properly start playing. There was no non lethal option, which meant you killed everyone you got rid of, there was no way to knock an enemy out. The lip syncing was so bad it was like they didn't even really try. The combat was not the best, as you had to keep parrying their attacks until you got to strike with a deadly blow, this was there to encourage stealth.
I hated the platforming, sometimes it would work perfectly and the next you'd fall to your death because he wouldn't grab a ledge. It got to the point where I saved after every jump, I didn't trust the platforming one bit. Another annoyance was that Styx would automatically vault over a railing when you jumped across, he would never just hang on the ledge, this lead to me getting caught often when an enemy was on patrol as I always expected him to just hang there. There were insects too that would attack if they heard you as they were blind, but they didn't attack humans which made no sense, I tried more than once to get them close to each other so they'd fight, but it never happened.
The story was interesting, but I then struggled to keep up with it. At parts I just didn't know what was happening. If any enemy was investigating when they thought they saw you, you couldn't leave the area until they stopped looking, I thought this was dumb, as you should be able to finish the zone even if someone is looking, I mean why would you not proceed just because someone's looking for you? I was hiding behind an open door as a guard was patrolling and when he got close he somehow managed to spot me through the door and wall, there was no possible way for him to see me. On one mission you don't have your dagger and because of that you can't kill anyone during the mission, but it didn't make sense because Styx snaps there neck in the silent kill and doesn't use his dagger, it just made the mission so much more difficult. The finale was so disapointing that I'm not even gonna say anymore than that.
Styx was a good stealth game overall, it did have some problems but I enjoyed it. With a sequel confirmed, I'll be purchasing it, hopefully some tweaks to the problems I faced and some new additions could make it a great game. After this I'd like to go back and play the prequel.
6.8/10
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