The final bonus objective, No Kills, is a missed step in my opinion. Collecting certain hidden items, beating Par Times, having No Alerts and completing the levels with No Kills. Bonus XP can also be earned in four ways. Styxs skill trees are upgraded by playing through the game and completing objectives earning Skill Points, which are then spent at the end of a level. Just tapping ‘right’ on the D-pad and I had Quick Saved….sooo simple! It’s been a staple on PC for years and every console game should now copy this – no menus, no break in play…. I felt like I was free to experiment and have fun without the risk losing huge swaths of progress. Cyanide have combated this with a slick ‘Game Save’ anywhere button. One simple mistake ruins a sneaky run-through. One of the historic problems of stealth games is the ‘stealth fail state’. I could make him flee if loosing and just hide, letting the A.I alert status reset. And thankfully unlike Master of Shadows, Styx isn’t locked into the melee combat encounter. The other major improvement is that Styx can now hold his own in melee combat. Potion and trap crafting has been expanded and even an invisibility spell, that hits the perfect balance of usability versus costs on resources. Toxic ‘Styx clones’ that can be used as weapons or diversions and with the right skills, as a re-spawn point if he ends up in a dangerous situation. Styx has had a few upgrades from his 2014 outing. Hide in the shadows, deal out death to unsuspecting enemies and then vanish back into the darkness. The core mechanics will be familiar to any fan of stealth games. Fortunately, Cyanide Studios have doubled down on Styx: Shards of Darkness and have built beautiful multi-path levels, unique skill trees and thankfully this time, enemies with functional A.I. Master of Shadows was met with mediocre reviews which were in fact fair, due to a lack of polish and a bit of jank. Styx made his sneaking debut in 2014 in Master of Shadows, which I loved… until my 80% complete save file was ‘lost’ and I never had the gumption to start all over again. (Would never have predicted writing that in a sentence) Instead of a burly secret agent at its core, Shards of Darkness has a fowl mouthed, fourth wall breaking Goblin – who is short on stature…. Styx: Shards of Darkness is probably best described as a ‘Tolkienesque Splinter Cell’. I’ve always been a fan of stealth games and to my mind, the power of the current crop of consoles has afforded this great genre a bit of a resurgence.
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