Styx, the foul-mouthed killer/thief, is finally back after a nine-year hiatus for a new adventure. It’s amazing the return of the niche stealth series, and while it’s undeniably great to see the grumpy goblin back in action, Styx: Blades of Greed it feels more like a cautious relaunch than a triumphant return. It’s a more forgiving, more aggressive approach – tight and fun at the moment – but plays things frustratingly safe in both design and storytelling.
Available On: Xbox, PlayStation, PC
Updated On: PS5
Developed by: Cyanide Studio
Published by: NaconReview the copy provided by the publisher.
Surprisingly, the game picks up directly from the previous cliff-hanger ending. That’s confusing if you don’t remember what happened in the previous game, so shooting Blades of Greed I felt like I was being thrown into a test that I didn’t study for. Why am I in a crashing zeppelin? Who is this godfather boy? It was almost ten years ago, and I can’t remember what I ate yesterday. Help the old codger, yes?
One YouTube clip later and I was hooked – but it turns out I didn’t really need to. For the most part, you can mess around without much knowledge of the franchise, mostly because the characters aren’t so smart that whatever came before doesn’t matter.
The general plot sees Styx, alongside Helledryn and Djarak, trying to keep a powerful new resource called Quartz out of the hands of the Inquisition. Your friends have their own motivations for sticking together, even if the game doesn’t do much to explore them, while Styx once again takes on the role of anti-hero. He can absorb Quartz energy and it’s addictive as hell, so naturally you want to fix the next one. The fact that it keeps biting him every time he sucks is a problem and he happily ignores it until it hits him on the head.
On paper, Styx’s friends should be the most interesting part of the story. After all, you are lonely. Pairing up with an Orc shaman, a Dwarf engineer and a Dark Elf sounds like fertile ground for conflict and character development. Instead, this rich narrative soil is left uncultivated. Mostly just… they get along. There is little conflict until later, and when little conflict comes, it doesn’t matter because the characters themselves are underdeveloped. There’s a slight hint of a dysfunctional family trope here, but it doesn’t really bloom, either. They love each other, they hate each other – why are they together?
Aside from Styx himself, the voice acting is pretty useless. The minor NPCs – especially the guards who listen for information – deliver their lines with unusual intensity. The dialogue often feels hokey on purpose, but the performances stay squarely in hokey-in-a-bad-way territory. Even great partners are the best. The flat delivery is a huge problem, especially with Djarak, and Wren’s voice never fits the character’s build. Overall, the narrative never delivers that precise stab to the ribs. That’s right. It exists. But everything eventually leads to hope.
And thankfully, sneaking is still fun.
This is a quick translation of Styx. Previous entries required careful study of patrol routes and careful planning – including determining the right time to pull a person’s food to a painful death. Here, Styx is very fast from the start. There is a double jump available immediately, allowing you to jump into tight spaces with ease. You can get away with more, recover from mistakes more easily, and generally play a little more freely.
Other than that, it’s business as usual: hide in the shadows, sneak into closets, hang from rooftops, and wait for that perfect moment to slip past undetected or perform an emergency spine tap with a sword. Killing can be brutal and loud or slow and quiet, depending on your preference. It’s always satisfying to kill your way through every stage, even if you go through it undetected like walking through a bad family BBQ to burgers without being seen.
The enemy AI is standard stealth fare. If you are spotted, the guards investigate, move suspiciously for a moment, and eventually wander back to their patrol routes. There is little dynamic climbing or adaptation. And it’s always interesting how quickly they’ll accept the random death of a colleague by a falling chandelier or poisoning as a freak accident before leaving the corpse behind to get back to work. It works, but rarely surprises. Heavier enemies and armored animals at least require a bit more intelligence. You can’t just run in for a quick stab, so you’re encouraged to drop candles on their heads, poison nearby food, or use Styx’s power to disarm them before finishing them off. It’s an acceptable alliance, even if it doesn’t change much beyond that.
The tension has dropped significantly this time. The Styx’s extended skill set and aggressive toolkit make both kills and escapes easy. Being seen is not a disaster. Strange, mysterious combat that takes you back to the hidden. The one-on-one combat is manageable thanks to the lock-on system, but the animations are so stiff and clunky that you’ll often decide that cleverness is the better part of goblin valor. Especially goblin valor is backstabbing is something the better part.
Styx can still create clones of himself, but there has been an important change. You no longer have direct control unless you directly use his mind control ability. Instead, clones are deployed with great skill – thrown at enemies, hidden in hiding places to ambush, or hurled with chains of fire to cause natural carnage. You lose fine control, but when you switch you gain the ability to easily connect with your duplicate. I don’t think it’s better or worse – it’s just different.
Some strengths are more of a mixed bag. Mind control is useful for clearing a path, especially when it’s upgraded to allow you to force enemies into deadly drops. The burst ability that pushes enemies back is useful, although combat is intense and you won’t want to rely on it. The slow turns out to be consistently useful, whether it’s getting past patrols or quickly tearing down an animal’s defenses. In general, the powers in this one are more skewed compared to the previous games, which rely more on pure dodging.
Again, your abilities and tools are limited in your use due to Amber and resources, both of which are surprisingly hard to find. On the other hand, I like the idea that this makes you play smart and only use your skills when needed. And yet, it means you get to have less fun, and find yourself in situations where you’re not using your energy because you’re saving it for that one time you really need it. Except that time never comes. It’s like collecting all the bloody ingredients in an RPG.
Upgrades are handled through skill trees that improve Amber and Quartz’s abilities alongside more common tools like acid traps and throwing arrows. Completing the main quest is the main way to grow stronger, although collecting symbols scattered throughout the levels gives bonus XP, giving you a reason to explore a bit more. It’s still functional, if not particularly exciting.
Another less efficient change is the quick-access wheel system. Each wheel allows you to assign up to four abilities, but additional wheels are unlocked after optional download requests. As you unlock new powers, you’ll be constantly pausing to rearrange abilities or tackle dull side objectives just to stretch your loadout.
The download quests themselves are useless. Mission instructions are often vague, pointing you in a vague direction only for the object to be somewhere nearby that you wouldn’t guess. It feels unnecessarily dull.
That criticism extends to the wider design of the game. a lot of Blades of Greed it rotates around collecting the Quartz pieces in the three main open areas, returns to the zeppelin for a cutscene, completes the objective, and repeats the process. It’s a very predictable loop.
Now, to be fair, you can reduce almost any game purpose from wanting to download if you try hard enough. I mean The Lord of the Rings technically it’s just a quest to download back. The difference is that most games hide that plot with variety or narrative momentum. Here, the seams are showing.
The three main areas themselves are large and open, encouraging exploration and multiple routes to objectives. Interestingly, the enemies you eliminate remain dead in all encounters in those areas, at least until the next chapter starts. That persistence eliminates any long-term decline in mass killings, since clearing the area makes future visits much easier. New enemies spawn in certain missions, but they’ll just wander around the corpses of their teammates as if waiting for bosses to hire a cleanup crew.
There are many ways to achieve goals, although they rarely feel very different. It’s usually a choice between climbing a different wall, sliding to a different place, or going through another door. The freedom is welcome for now, but the amount of play feels somewhat limited unless you set your own limits.
Visually, the places are varied enough to avoid fatigue. The ramshackle city below slowly gives way to the pristine regions above, a forest full of bugs and literal orcs, and the ruins of Akanash cover it as a reminder of the events of the past. It’s not shocking, but it’s different.
Technically, the game remains firmly in that A-to-double-A slot. There is a small layer of jank in the animations and presentation – nothing dangerous, but noticeable. A few bugs appear, such as guards failing to restart patrol routes and walking endlessly instead. Framerate is usually stable during normal gameplay, but dips significantly when using a fast-moving balloon between locations.
For all its faults, I enjoyed stopping by this one. There is plenty of room to climb, jump, and hide on the beams. Level designers clearly understand that stealth games live and die by the location layer, and thus Blades of Greed he succeeds. As you progress through the story you are gradually given new tools that open up more areas to explore, adding a little dash of metroidvania to all the killing and looting.
In conclusion…
After nine years in the shadows, it’s undoubtedly good to have Styx back. Blades of Greed it delivers solid subtlety, satisfying stance, and enough mechanical evolution to keep things interesting. But it also plays things frustratingly safe. The story is empty, the plot relies heavily on uninspired repetition, and the presentation never escapes its rough edges.
There’s some fun to be had here – especially if your favorite secret philosophy involves leaving without witnesses – but in the long run this isn’t a great way for Styx to come back. Rather, it’s a skillful comeback that sneaks back into the scene rather than kicking the door down.
