Styx Game: Shards of Darkness Review 2017

About This Game

Discover and master vast open environments, sneak past or shoot new enemies and bosses, and research with the new array of lethal abilities and artillery in our goblin assassin's arsenal. Sneak your way alone, or with a friend in coop mode! Climb the dizzying Elven city, traverse the perilous region of the Dwarfs, and survive vast uncharted lands filled with lethal dangers to fulfill your assignment… failure to succeed could have huge penalty for your kin.

Clamber, dangle, and hang through multi-layered sandbox environments brought to life with Unreal Engine 4. Tiptoe and hide in the darkest corners, or reach heights to avoid recognition. Spend knowledge points in elimination, infiltration, magic, etc. to study new skills and abilities. Explore the world to convalesce priceless artifacts, find ingredients to craft deadly traps and useful items, and create clones of yourself to entertain and mislead the many types of enemies on your way - the preference is yours!

Structure Requirements
 Minimum:
 OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit)
 Processor: AMD FX-6300 (3,5GHz) / Intel i5-2500 (3,3GHz)
 Graphics: 1 GB, AMD Radeon R7 260X / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
 Memory: 8 GB RAM
 DirectX: Version 11
 Storage: 11 GB available space
 Additional Notes: Internet Connection Necessary (ONLINE GAME)

 Recommended:
o OS: Windows 7 / 8 / 10 (64-bit)
o Memory: 8 GB RAM
o Processor: AMD FX-8350 X8 (4,0 GHz)/Intel Core i7-4790 (3,6 GHz)
o Graphics: 4 GB, AMD Radeon R9 390 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
o DirectX: Version 11
o Storage: 11 GB available space
o Additional Notes: Internet Connection Necessary (ONLINE GAME)

A number of folks will hate him and his foul-mouthed Family Guy-caliber quips, but I love him. In cutscenes and in fourth-wall flouting remarks he comes off as the only person who's truly getting the gag, kind of like a small green Deadpool. He's a unusually appealing foil to all the dour folks around him, all of whom are trying to trick each other for control of the precious tawny so much of this world – including stealth abilities – runs on. None of the typescript are particularly awful, but Styx himself is so brilliantly far ahead of them in terms of categorization, voice acting, animation, and joking that just listening to the audio feels a bit like listening to a Mystery Science Theater 3000 viewing of a directly-faced film.

A moderately polite story follows Styx through nine missions over approximately 15 hours as he cronies up with a group that's technically committed to the annihilation of his race and speedily leads down deeper rabbit holes. Sometimes Shards of Darkness introduces a entertaining mission, such as when Styx needs to haul a drunken chief to his ship, but most of the time the tale itself is full of bulky themes that might not be noticeable from all the snark widespread in the trailers.

Cyanide, regrettably, doesn't use this rich setting to its full probable. The opening hours in attendance investigative wonders of vertical design, absolute with Styx shimmying and grappling his away over the rooftops and under the boardwalks of majestic steampunk airships, shabby fishing villages, and depressing dark elven cities burrowed into peaks. It's a shame the fumbly act of jumping from ledge to ledge in midair comes off as one of Shards of Darkness' weak points, to say nothing of the unpleasantness of swinging from a rope, but it’s feasible. These are devotedly designed levels that take hours to explore fully, and they're stuffed with chests, wardrobes, and baskets for Styx to hide in and alarms to boobytrap. Puzzles requiring memories of earlier cutscenes occasionally deliver awesome new daggers, and trials test Styx's reflexes.

It's a humiliation the enemies don't fluctuate much from each other. Shards of Darkness includes everything from drunken pirates to heavily toughened elves and brawny dwarves, but when fighting them or sneakily killing them, they all play about the same. At least the AI is reasonably decent this time around, and I remember being dazed when a knight found me and yanked me out from my hidey hole and skewered me with his foil because I'd been too confident and hadn't shrunk further back into the darkness when I first hid there. Sometimes I'd catch them bugged and walking in tiny circles or, most annoyingly, I'd see an ogre reputation on air when the trap door he was supposed to fall through opened, but for the most part Shards of Darkness requires no tricks to learn the secrets of its sneakiness. Don't be seen. That's about it, and as it should be.

Shards of Darkness also includes a functional two-player obliging mode, but it works better on some missions more than others. In those where Styx just has to stay entirely out of sight, another goblin hanging around can be more maddening than helpful. The mission will end utterly, just because one goblin was seen, and since the co-op mode doesn't hold the capability to save anywhere, it's a recipe for gnashed teeth rather than good times. In standard missions, though, where one player can toss a glass to entertain a guard while the other one runs up and kills him while he's turned away, it's enormously rewarding. Even then, though, the animations on the guest goblin seem to quake a bit, as though they're being rendered in half the frames per second as the background. It doesn't ruin the gameplay, but it is a bit disturbing.