Styx: Blades of Greed

A goblin with nowhere to go

Styx has always been a small, foul-mouthed monster with an outsized personality, and the biggest compliment "Blades of Greed" earns is that the character himself survives the transition mostly intact. After "Shards of Darkness" leaned hard into fourth-wall-breaking one-liners that some fans felt betrayed the character, Cyanide has pulled Styx back toward his grimmer "Master of Shadows" roots. One player put it bluntly: "I very much appreciate him going back to his Master of Shadows personality, rather than his god awful 4th wall breaking deadpool Shards of Darkness personality." The voice work carries the game in a lot of places where the writing around it doesn't.

The problem is everything Cyanide built around that voice. The developer swapped the series' tightly scored, replayable levels for an open-world "sandbox hub" structure, and the reaction from the people who actually finished the first two games has been close to unanimous: this is a Styx game with the stealth surgically removed from its scoring, if not entirely from its mechanics.

Mobility is the best thing here

Whatever else has gone wrong, the traversal upgrade is real. Styx can now grapple, glide, roll between cover, and move with a target mid-kill, and reviewers who otherwise disliked the game still credited this part of the redesign. A detailed technical review summed it up as a game that "improves the series in mobility, verticality, and pacing, but it suffers from shallow stealth depth (AI/patterns are too simple), structural repetition, and a visually unstable technical presentation." Multiple players independently singled out the opening zone, "The Wall," as the strongest single space in the game: "The first map The Wall is really cool and I spent so much time just ignoring the main objectives to just explore around. The other two zones feel rushed and not as interesting."

That "front-loaded" complaint recurs constantly. Cyanide clearly poured its best level design into the introduction and then had to stretch a much thinner budget of ideas across an open continent for the remaining acts, and the seams show.

Every mission is the same errand

The series used to hand players discrete levels graded on speed, detection, and kills, with side collectibles worth replaying a level to grab. "Blades of Greed" throws that out for open zones stitched together by fetch quests, and the complaint about what replaced it is close to universal. "Every main mission is just go absorb this quartz and that's it with zero variety. The old games had missions where you got graded on speed, alerts, kills, and collectibles that made each level replayable. I do not see myself touching this game again after completing it," wrote one longtime fan, adding: "I think they traded the tight mission structure that made the series special for scale they couldn't fully deliver on."

A second, more structural take agreed on the mechanism even while trying to stay positive about the underlying gameplay: "Blades of Greed improves on the stealth mechanics of the Styx series, only to make them almost irrelevant. You can now close doors behind you and roll from cover to cover... This change is great for exploration, but because the missions are quest like and take place in the world, it means there are no 'Levels' per se and therefore no scoring system." Without a scoring system, there's no reason to replay a mission for a better grade, and without that loop, "Blades of Greed" loses the thing that gave the earlier games their long tail.

A plot that never actually starts

The narrative fares worse than the mission design. Where the first two games built out Styx's backstory and a genuine conspiracy, this one settles for repeated collect-the-quartz busywork punctuated by act breaks. "The story is intermittent, basically only existing at the start and end of an Act. In between that is nothing but open-world filler. You spend 80% of the game wandering around on glorified fetch quests, with very little information or actual direction," one reviewer wrote, in a review that otherwise praised the graphics, voice acting, and soundtrack. A separate review confirmed the same shape of complaint from a different angle: "The plot never really has a sense that anything is progressing, you just go from objective to objective never gaining any insit into the antagonists obectives, how they are acheiving them."

The world itself doesn't compensate for the thin plot the way an open map ideally would. One player who has 100%-ed the previous two games without a guide found this one simply didn't hold their attention: "This bored me, which as someone who loved the last two enough to get every achievement without looking them up is saying something. Ultimately I think this is down to the world being to big, and to empty with little incentive to explore beyond resources and potions... Totally killed the living world feel, and felt more like a sandbox of murder and resources."

Unreal Engine 5 has not been kind to this team

Cyanide moved the series to UE5 for this entry, and the reviews are consistent about the results being rough: ghosting, ugly color grading, ropey texture work, and general instability show up across reviews written weeks apart, meaning this isn't a launch-day-only problem that a single early patch fixed. One player, clearly a fan trying to be constructive, wrote: "I had to learn how UE5 works under the hood to fix the crazy blur, the color saturation (everything looks brown), performance... it's clear to me that this team was not trained properly with this engine." Another framed it as an industry-wide concern rather than a one-off complaint: "While the game runs relatively stable on Unreal Engine 5, its technical state remains appalling. It is plagued by numerous bugs and strange graphical artifacts."

The worst individual report is a genuinely game-breaking bug, not a cosmetic one. A player who had put 27 hours into the game hit a mission-critical door in the hideout that simply refused to open: "My main complaint after paying full price is that I got stuck to a game breaking bug after playing the game for 27 hours. And I kid you not, it's a mission critical door being stuck closed. No open prompts at all... so now I can't launch any missions at all or play the game... There is no fix other than restarting the whole game from beginning and hoping that the game doesn't bug out again at the same point." That review was written two and a half weeks after release, meaning the bug survived Cyanide's first wave of post-launch patching.

Too easy, and less rewarding for it

The series historically rewarded a "ghost" playstyle: staying undetected, avoiding kills, and earning skill points for restraint. "Blades of Greed" removed the badge system that tracked and rewarded that behavior, and multiple reviewers connected that removal directly to a difficulty collapse. "It feels very different from the previous titles and is way too easy—even on Goblin difficulty," one player wrote, adding that Cyanide also "removed features like the 'no kills' and 'undetected' badges that used to reward XP. They also made using items like sand and throwing knives unnecessarily complicated. In the previous games, it was a simple one-click action. Now, you have to press two different buttons just to use them."

A second review made the same point about the difficulty ceiling from a combat-focused angle: "The gameplay is more assassin than thief. Previous games rewarded you for avoiding killing and staying hidden. This one is about butchering whole map with impunity. This also makes the game silly easy even on highest difficulty. Minimal replayability." The Steam achievement data backs up how rarely players engage with the game's harder optional content: skill-completionist and stealth-mastery achievements like SKILL_MIND_CONTROL_CLONE (10.1%) and SKILL_UNLOCK_ALL (7.9%) sit far below the tutorial-tier STORY_TUTO at 74.9%, a spread consistent with a game most players coast through rather than push against.

Verdict

"Blades of Greed" is not a broken game in the sense of being unplayable for most people, and its best hour — climbing and gliding through The Wall while Styx mutters to himself — genuinely recaptures what made "Master of Shadows" special. But Cyanide swapped a tightly scored, replayable stealth structure for an open world it didn't have the content or the technical polish to fill, and shipped it with UE5 problems severe enough to soft-lock at least one player after 27 hours. One reviewer's summary of a 50-hour playthrough captures the split verdict better than any score can: "Was it janky? Absolutely. Was it campy and nonsensical? It sure was. Was it better than the second game? Obviously not, it was worse. But was it Styx? 100%, it was 50 hours of pure Styx, warts and all." Fans of the character will likely still find something here worth finishing. Fans of the stealth systems that built the series' reputation have a real case for waiting on patches, or skipping it.