Styx: Shards of Darkness

Was a great co-op game to play with my partner.

very enjoyable

good goblin game

Assassin's Creed if it was still good

If Thief 1-3 were your favorite games, or at least favorite stealth games and dishonoured was your second choice, this will be your third if not second. Play it, you'll have a great time, not sure this game is suitable for the COD crowd, because it requires planning, patience and stealth (and no, not just pressing crouch), you can't just run in and kill everyone.

This game is impossibly difficult when it comes to being able to parry enemies, even on the easiest difficulty available, if you don't get the parry timing perfectly, you die in 2 hits. After a frustrating 30 deaths (literally) and reloads to my last check point (i really wanted to give the game a chance and learn how to parry but it was next to impossible, only succeeding once), i gave up and decided this game is far too difficult and not worth the time. Also, When alerting the enemies it takes far far too long for them to resume position and go back to what they were initially doing. for this reason I removed the game.

terrible stealth options for a stealth game.

God tier stealth game with goblins.

A solid stealth game. The humour in this game is really a matter of preference.

A game for STEALTH PURISTS.
This game takes everything master of shadows had and improved it.
Goodstuffs:

The environments feel so much denser and natural, instead of out of place anchors on the wall for no reason you can climb, shimmy and leap from ledge to ledge.
Combat is designed to encourage you to be sneaky just like before, but it controls way less stiffly now. You're a master sneaker not a master warrior. Styx can take on one or two guys but he gets locked into an animation while executing a dude and can generally only take a few hits, armored enemies are much more common now, you need to use the environment to kill them (dropping stuff on their heads, pushing them off ledges, traps)

Way more customisation options,a much more complex skill tree in addition to different outfits and daggers with effects that change your playstyle. If you really want you can go naked styx with no dagger for the true goblin experience.
There's also crafting which seems lame at first, but as I played more I liked how it rewarded you for exploring the levels. The new items fill in a good few niches that didn't exist in MoS (Distractions, traps, stun) and the best one by far is the cocoon, which massively increases your options for traversal.

The soundtrack is also fantastic, the combination of the cello and grungy horn is very goblin'y, there's also musical stingers that activate when you kill a guy, get spotted or almost fall.


Badstuffs:
Styx is very different in this game than his other 2 depictions. If you like comic book quipsters like deadpool and spiderman you might like this version of the goblin. But for me he feels a little obnoxious and I prefer the edgy antisocial rebel goblin in MoS.

The only area where I think MoS beats this game is in story. Everything else is way better (environments, platforming etc). The story is pretty much just a bunch of excuses to creep around in cool places which are more varied and interesting than MoS but the reason for doing it isn't as compelling. And don't get me started on that crappy cliffhanger ending.

I liked helledryn and styx as a duo, a goblin exterminator and a pro goblin becoming allies and friends is fun.
but other than that the story sucks.

Overall:
8.5/10. Great gameplay and soundtrack but the story is bland with an unsatisfying ending.

more

Great stealth game in a fantasy setting. You immediately feel the improvements since the first game (Master of Shadows).
I really enjoyed the level and mission design as well as the gameplay itself.

Only downsides:
-rope swinging physics are kinda broken (not gamebreaking and you don't have to do it often, but still tedious)
-ropes themselves are also off. Sometimee when I fell while swinging and had to reload the rope was stuck on the ceiling and I had to restart the zone
-last mission has no savepoint in the beginning (no autosave and manual save is blocked for a part), so if you fail you get back to the hub and have to load the level again. Only workaround is to choose "restart mission/zone" instead of "load last save"
-some plot threads are unresolved
-imho Styx' comments are too tryhard edgy sometimes

Pretty please with sugar on top give us Styx 3 already!

This game is awful, i love it.
The AI sucks balls, but it's so funny, my friend and i were dying laughing while playing this game.
Def worth getting to play with a friend, don't know how it is solo.

It's stealthy. It's challenging depending on your play style. You will save a lot and load a lot. Not really designed for speed runs, but I might be wrong.

Playing Styx: Shards of Darkness in co-op is like signing up for a masterclass in stealth with your friend with an arrogant goblin as your mentor.

The idea of sneaking together sounds great in theory. In practice, it’s more like:

“You distract the guards while I climb this ledge.”
Loud crash “Wait, what ledge?!”

And let’s not forget the inevitable blame game:
“You alerted the guards!” NO! Its you noooooob!
“No, YOU bumped into the vase!”
“Who even puts a vase there?!”

Every co-op session quickly turns into a chaotic result of bad decisions and accidental betrayals. One second, you’re whispering, “Be quiet, there’s a guard ahead,” and the next, your friend is loudly alerting the guard while trying to steal the quest's item we were eyeing.

Despite the carnage, this co-op mode is a laugh-out-loud goblin movie waiting to happen. Whether you succeed or fail (mostly fail I can say haha), you’ll walk away with stories of epic mishaps that are worth every respawn.

You do not need to buy the DLC to enjoy this game to the fullest, the DLC is your "friend" that willing to play co-op with you in the most chaotic way!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for anyone who enjoys stealth games... or just wants to watch their friendship turned into chaos haha!

goblin mode

THE GOAT PELTOGOBLIN

Stealth good. Jokes good. Plot twists good, Boss fights kinda wack.

Be a Sneaky Goblin

Part 2

A worthy sequel to Styx: Master of Shadows. I loved challenge upgrade from last game, with new abilities and gear making the game play quite enjoyable.

Loved the new characters, but the cliffhanger was disappointing. Can't wait for the sequel of the game!

A solid stealth game. Seems better than the original, which I really could not get into. This is a pretty standard stealth game from what I can tell, it's not an immersive sim, but some sections of the levels are non linear enough that you can complete them in whatever order you want. There doesn't seem to be anything that is particularly unique about it, just sneak up on guards and gut them, but there are so few stealth games I'll take what I can get. The game does feel a little sloppy at times, even on the first level npc animations glitch out, there are framerate drops (on a 7+ year old game), The kill animations move the NPCs awkwardly. Still worth a play.

Fun game, stupid ending.

hf

A Stealth Masterpiece with Great Humor and Challenge!

This fucking 4’3 green asshole with a big ass nose bullies the everloving shit out of me every time I fucking die in this god damn game because I’m playing on the hardest difficulty and Styx is being a fucking asshole as usual. 10/10 game would recommend.

Dishonored but if it was actually good

If you like stealth. An easy game to pick up and play. Too bad that another one isn't being made, both Styx games are well made stealth games. Just not advertised and people don't know about it.

Very fun, very enjoyable. Played it with my friend and we excelled at goblining ourselves (hehehe) through the story. The very edgy oneliners and shallow story make for real belly laughs. Very enjoyable.

Very fun game. Especially with a duo! No I think playing with a duo is basically mandatory. What I liked about the game most was the ending when

Unfortunately Styx: Shards of Darkness is a downgrade from its predecessor in almost every regard. As such i could only recommend this to people who loved the first game and are desperate for more.

The gameplay in Shards of Darkness is mostly the same as Master of Shadows, yet somehow it manages to be easier and more frustrating at the same time. This game commits possibly the biggest crime a stealth game can. Terrible AI. Enemies are incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes they will spot you instantly while you are in complete darkness, and sometimes they wont see you run right past them in bright light. Even ignoring that, the gameplay is just not great. There is essentially no new enemies that were not in the previous game. There is a new type of roabie and now dwarves, but the dwarves are functionally the same as the elves at the end of the Master of Shadows. There is numerous other gameplay issues, such as how they also managed to make turning out torches a liability. Putting out a torch actually makes you more likely to get caught as enemies become alert when they see an unlit torch and path towards it. Instead of putting out torches to hide in the darkness, their only use is to be a mild distraction.

But the biggest downgrade from the Master of Shadows has to be the frankly atrocious story and writing. Master of shadows had a very interesting story with good, if rather edgy writing. The story in Shards of darkness is utterly incomprehensible. The main villain might as well not exist, characters never explain their motivations and almost nothing is ever explained. The writing is just groan inducing levels of terrible. Styx now speaks almost entirely in pop culture references and 4th wall breaks and he never bloody stops. The voice acting is also very low quality. There's only about 6 or 7 voice actors in total, and Styx is the only one who is consistently good. The others range from mediocre to just plain terrible.

Overall i am incredibly disappointed by this game. Master of Shadows was not a perfect game, but i did like it despite its flaws. i found myself speed running Shards of Darkness as i just wanted it to end. Unless you are desperate for more Styx, i would recommend skipping this game entirely.

In a time where DEI seems the norm this is a breath of smelly filthy medieval stench I wholeheartedly welcome.

Edit: It does break the 4th wall a bit when Styx addresses you as a gamer directly and certain language used that is contemporary and thus breaks immersion a bit. An attempt at direct interaction with the player to add moxie to Styx who is already oozing with the stuff seems redundant when executed this way.

A great stealth game, funny main character and an interesting fantasy based story. Enjoyed it a lot and really hope they continue the series with a 3rd game! They seemed to learn a few lessons from their first game as this one seems much more polished and fixes a few of the control issues that bothered me before (Like being able easily drop and hang off a ledge)

The levels do get a little reused (At least twice each) which does make sense story wise but content wise disappointed me a bit, but that's really the only real negative I can think of.

If you like stealth games, get it, but if you haven't played Styx Master of Shadows, go play that one first! The game and story stands up on it's own if you haven't played the first game but might as well do things in order.

Also Co-op is a lot of fun and lets you play the full campaign with a friend! Rare enough for most games but especially rare for stealth games, recommend giving that a play through too!

This is an amazing game. Beautiful graphics, great storyline, and fun missions. A hidden gem! Definitely recommend it.

[SPOILER ALERT]

If you are a fan of stealth games, you should know Styx. It has a good story and game mechanics but the ending was honestly anticlimactic and disappointing.

Step 1: Buy game
Step 2: Play for 5 minutes
Step 3: Die.
Step 4: Get called "Retard" by a fucking Goblin with a drug problem.
Great game 10/10

Great stealth game

Basically an improvement on the already decent "Master of Shadows" in every way.

.

As someone who plays a lot of stealth games, I enjoyed it overall. It cleaned up some of the issues I had with the original game, but it did lose a bit in the process by tempering down on some of the rougher points that made the original feel unique.

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The core gameplay is largely the same as its predecessor. Styx: Master of Shadows. Styx is a pure stealth game and doesn’t stray into the trap of giving you stealth as an option while still making combat an equally viable option. You have to stick to blind spots and shadows to either slip past or kill enemies without being detected. Getting caught is practically a death sentence unless you’re able to escape quickly so keeping hidden is your only realistic option for beating the game. I really liked the mechanics of the first game and I feel the same way about this one too.

The biggest changes to the gameplay are with the items and abilities, though I’m somewhat conflicted on whether I like them overall. Rather than finding items across the map, you now find raw materials and can craft items of your choosing between missions or upon finding crafting stations. While this does give you more flexibility and predictability regarding what tools you’ll have at your disposal, it does mean there’s a lot less reason to conserve your items for a particularly tricky situation unlike the first game where they were a precious resource.

Likewise, the abilities are much stronger and provide you with far more options than before. You can craft better gear, reduce the sound you produce, kill in different ways, and more. While this does make a lot of the moment-to-moment gameplay more fun, it does reduce the tension since you have far more ways out of a tricky situation compared to the restrictions posed by the first game. While the gameplay does have some more polish around movement, climbing, and interactions with the physics that I appreciated, they add to the general feeling that the game is going easy on you by taking away the points of the first game that, while rough, contributed to the tension and restrictiveness of the stealth that made it such a good experience.

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Aside from the mechanics, the level and mission design has changed substantially. I like the levels much more this time around. While both game's levels are visually distinctive, the actual layout and gameplay ‘feel’ of each is much more varied in the Shards of Darkness. Each level feels like it's asking for a different approach thanks to the variety in environmental hazards, enemy types, and how both of these are placed throughout the map rather than just putting a different set of paint on the same challenges as before. The actual layout also has a lot more options for traversal which, combined with the polish to the movement I mentioned earlier, makes the stealth feel much smoother with more time spent on actions and less on watching and waiting.

By far my biggest issue with Master of Shadows was the repetition of levels in the 2nd half of the game. The entire back half (barring the very finale) was just a slightly tweaked replay of a level from the first half with some changes to the objective and enemies. It sucked and really made the game a chore to complete. But while Shards of Darkness does still repeat some (but not all) levels, it did a far better job of making them feel distinct from the first run. The missions are substantially different. Each level is large and you probably missed a lot of stuff in your first run. On the replay, the mission objectives will typically send you to the parts of the level that were the least important during the first run and often require different methods of traversal thanks to changed enemy placements and obstacles. So while the level itself is the same, your engagement with it on the gameplay’s end still feels fresh. While some parts did this better than others, I never felt like I was desperate for the level to end in the same way I did throughout much of the first game.

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The gameplay and levels are easily the most important parts of the game. But I should still at least mention the other aspects. The story is…. well it's not worth paying attention to. I didn’t mention it in my review of the first game but the story was actually quite good. Its narrow focus and integration with the gameplay made it surprisingly impactful and while I didn’t really value it as much as the gameplay I did at least appreciate that it tried to do something interesting. The sequel's story is uninteresting. Styx steals something, guy steals the thing from Styx, and Styx tries to get it back while getting involved with other important stuff in the process. It’s uninteresting and pretty detached from anything gameplay related so I choose to ignore it.

But even worse than the bland and forgettable story, this game made some noteworthy changes to Styx’s personality. In the first game Styx was a morose, selfish, uncaring, and generally bitter creature who doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself. But in the new game, his personality has become even worse: he’s become cringe. Styx tells so many dumb jokes that all feel like they were killing me on the inside. Every time you die, Styx will break the 4th wall to berate the play and say you suck at the game. He feels like you took an outline of his personality from the first game and asked the marketing team to make him into something that 2010s teenagers will love (they won't, but marketing will think they will). The worst part of dying wasn't the knowledge that I would have to redo the gameplay, it was that I would have to put op will several seconds of the cringiest dialogue I've seen in an otherwise serious game. It's not a big deal or anything, but it's bad enough to warrant mentioning.

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Broadly speaking, I prefer the gameplay of Masters of Shadows and the levels of Shards of Darkness. This game simply lacks the pressure and tension that characterized the feel of the first game by making everything so much more smooth and flexible. But the relative shortcomings of the gameplay are outweighed by the improved level design, better handling of repeated content, and fixing all the jank and awkward flow of the first game. Both games are definitely worth playing, but I imagine most people will agree that Shards of Darkness is the better of the two. As long as you’re interested in stealth games then I would definitely recommend playing it yourself.

Funny goblin stealth game with edgy humour. few glitches few and far between. I had a really fun time playing it 8/10

Amazing game!

Bestest Stealth Game much recommend

Set gamemode to master then spent 4.5 hours getting though prologue
super fun

this game sucks and i am so glad to never play this again. more like dyx sharts of fuck this

Has dwarves in the game, although you play with a goblin.
Best stealth game I played so far, really fun. The writing is funny, the art is astounding.
I barely know english anymore, but I think you get it.
Full price recommended.

I just finished the 100% (on both of them) and it was a fun run. The second opus really add a lot of QOL, controls are better, smoother (tho still a bit stiff) and the visual effects are really well done. Maps are still beautifully crafted, with a lot of variety, some height that makes the game more vertical (but not easy) ! Goblin difficulty is my go too since you HAVE to be stealth ! It’s also very enjoyable that you have some skills that help you but not make the game no brainer ! Honestly I recommend this game for any stealth enjoyer and satiric humor fans ! Bonus point for Styx roasting you when you die :)

One of my favorites.

Excellent game, great stealth. Fast loading when you die. Very funny.

Pros and cons.
Pros: Good game, funny game over screens, good story, and good stealth.

Cons: AI can get stuck in some bits, areas of the mission are too hard even with it being on easy mode, poor placement of save areas on the final boss and not being able to save as well, pointless areas you can get stuck in, dawf AI being able to smell you through walls, the game is short with only having 9 missions in total. Hey devs where is mission 10? why did you cut it off at 9? I doubt they will make another game of this.