Styx is a thief-like game where you control a goblin (named Styx) in a fairly unique environment, a large city possibly build on clouds. The main gameplay mechanic is sneaking around the map and assassinating your enemies, though if played at lower difficulty you can also engage in combat with them (on highest difficulty you get instakilled in combat). Styx stands out mainly due to its unusual hero, memorable setting and some impressing landscapes. However it lacks polish with its imprecise movements, dumb AI, recycled levels, inconsistencies with physics and view angles and fairly dated graphics including shadow graphics, which you would expect to be better in a game like this.
Graphics 6/10
Graphics in Styx can be at times both impressing, however also frustrating. What is good are the landscapes and views you get. As mentioned the game takes place in a large city in the clouds called the Atrium of Akenash. This allows for some very nice and impressing views of architecture in clouds in many of the game's locations. However a great part of the game is also spend in dank sewers where the graphics are less impressing and tend to be absolutely generic, every corridor looking like the previous.
However the main problem with the graphics are the shadows. When Styx the goblin is standing in a shadow where he is hidden, his arm starts glowing so that you know he is hidden. At first i though ok this is an idea comparable to the stealth gem from the Thief games so you can be sure you are hidden. However you will need it more than that and will grow to rely on it. Why? Because a lot of the shadows in the game are weak, it can look like you are in plain sight and everybody can see you, but in fact you are hidden, which you wouldn't have known without the arm thingy, because the game's shadow zones and not well defined from non-shadow zones. I tried tuning down the brightness as much as possible, however it helped only to some degree, the shadow zones in the game are simply not distinguished enough from zones which no longer stealth you. Perhaps the Thief games spoiled me too much and I am expecting to be able to judge when I am hidden just by looking at my environment, perhaps, but anyway Styx did not deliver the shadow play you would hope from such a game..
Sound 5/10
The big plus here is how unique the main hero is. He is a goblin, not a particularly nice person, who swears a lot and wants to kill a lot. That said a lot of the lines sound outright not believable and dumb so I am neutral about the voice acting part on the main hero part. Music is not interesting as aren't the environmental sounds.
A big negative here is the guard speech, i.e. the talk guards have when they discovered you / discovered a body, etc. There are very few lines scripted here and you will be hearing the same lines over and over again. Sometimes 3 guards rush to a body one after another and all of them repeat the same line, this is even more irritating because every single soldier who discovers a body goes to check it, even if his companions discovered it beforehand and were vocal about it (hey guys there is a body here), but anyway as soon as he spots the body for the first time himself it's another check up with the same boring voice acting line. This is even more annoying if we look at the bugs I mention in the Gameplay part.
Story 6/10
Plus is, it's unique. Akenash contains a World Tree, something like a Tree of life, and you are here to steal its heart, which is guarded by both humans and elves. There are some plot twist around the way, though I expected the biggest one. However this is individual and other people might not expect it so am not really deducing points for it. What I can deduce points for though is the ending, it's fairly boring. Both the end fight is just easy and annoying as well as the ending cinematic which does not explain anything. Most cutscenes are presented in hand drawn style reminiscent of older games which at least is a plus, their content is boring though.
Gameplay 3/10
As mentioned, this game is a sneaker. So you would expect a lot of mechanics with assassinations right? Well there aren't that many. You can either have hard assassinations where enemies can discover a body which counts as killed, these include a standard backstab, aerial stab, cover stab and ledge stab. That's about it, however the stab while hanging on the ledge is near impossible to execute due to certain bugs mentioned later on. Second are accidental killings where enemies will not get suspicious. You would expect this category to be broad, why not, accidents can happen, right?!?! But instead it's just 2, you either poison a fruit bowl or you drop a chandelier on somebody's head. Just 2, TWO, types of accidents, for the whole long boring game. I'll let you be the judge if that does not get repetitive.
Now for the imprecise movements. What I meant was that sometimes the same action has a different outcome, for ex. you are hanging from a ledge and you try to jump to a different ledge, yet sometimes even though you should reach, you won't and you will fall to your dead. Happened countless times and it is freaking annoying.
View angles and distances for guard are imprecise as well. A guard might not see you killing a guard in the shadows, but as soon as the guard body hits the floor, he will see the body and start running towards it. Wtf? So he didn't see the guy got his throat slit, but he saw that he was lying on the floor the seconds after?
This view inconsistency carries on the ledges. When you jump from below and remain hanging on a ledge or let go of a ledge you were handing on, for some reason the guy on the ledge will spot you even if you never for a second crossed his sight. Mind you he cannot see the hands on the ledge, if you are already hanging from the ledge and he passes by he will not see you. He will only see you if you are executing a jump command to the ledge (but from below where he should be able to see you!) OR if you are letting go of a ledge, which is not understandable as he should be able to see you.
Another bug are saving / loading inconsistencies. For some reason if you load, certain actions reset. For ex. if a guard discovered a body and went back on his patrol, if you load he will forget this and next time he sees the body he will again go to investigate (saying his stupid quote). Sometimes guards move when you load, for ex. you save a game with a guard with his back towards you, you load and abracadabra he is no longer with his back towards you. Lastly all pots and chairs and movable objects get moved to their default locations after loading. So you suddenly might be in the middle of a group of vases with the slightest movement knocking them aside! Have fun!
The AI is outright dumb, they discover a body, then they search the area (about 1 square meter maximum) and within 20 seconds they resume they patrol. They never partner up in a search, if you have a long table which to hide under, they will always look only under one side at a time (even if there are 3 guards present) so you can just cross from side to side and not be discovered.
The worst for the last. Late game many many of the levels are RECYCLED. Yes you heard right, you will be replaying the same maps, just with different guard placement. The most BORING thing ever. There is even a map used 3 times in the game..............................................
The only positive thing about the gameplay are the magical abilities - you can make yourself invisible, use a vision which let's you see objectives better or you can summon another goblin and play as him without risking getting yourself killed. However these abilities require mana (amber) and mana flasks are hard to come by. Besides that there are only 3 of these abilities so not much.
Replay Value 4/10
During a mission you can try to achieve one of the 4 hard to achieve objectives, such as not killing a single enemy or not being discovered. So there is some replay value. However as every mission has 4 parts and each part can last 15-30 minutes or more, fulfilling these objectives is a real pain and they are frankly not worth the trouble for the small expo boost they give you. I tried at least fulfilling the objective of gathering all 40 pendants in the mission. However gave up as this is an all or nothing hunt. If you gather 39 you will get absolutely nothing, only if you gather 40 you will get bonus expo. Let's compare this to the loot mechanic you had in Thief saga games. You had to gather loot in a certain amount and the higher the difficulty the bigger the amount. At highest difficulty level you had to gather around 85-90% loot in a level. This was a lot, but not 100%, so there was room to play the game instead of looking in every damn nook and cranny for absolutely everything. Here in Styx, you must gather 100% or nothing, there is no motivation to gather 70% or 90%, nothing, no stepped objectives, just the ultimate ones.
Overall Styx is mediocre at what it does, it has some nice views and some uniqueness in story and characters. But it is littered with bugs and inconsistencies, poor AI and overall repetitiveness of both levels as well as mechanics. If you have nothing else to play and wanna play a sneaker, why not? If you would like a better introduction to the genre try Thief 1,2,3 or the Hitman series. In all honesty the game bored the hell out of me and I stopped playing it 3 times, if I had something better to play I probably would not have finished it. Overall would rate it as 4.5 as the devs tried at least something unique, but as we can't score half scores anymore, going for s 5, just for the effort. That is all.