Styx: Blades of Greed was provided by NACON for review. Thank you!
Styx: Blades of Greed should have been the point where this series finally stepped out of the shadows of its own limitations. Instead, it feels like it’s clumsily stumbled backwards into them.
The earlier Styx games were rough around the edges, sure, but they had a clarity of purpose. They understood that tension comes from vulnerability, and they built tight, focused stealth sandboxes around that idea. Blades of Greed keeps the vulnerability but loses much of the control that made it satisfying. Styx still can’t win a fair fight, as expected, but here that fragility often translates into frustration rather than tension. Detection can feel erratic, patrol behaviours inconsistent, and when things go wrong, they unravel in ways that feel less like consequences of your decisions and more like systems buckling under pressure. It's an entirely frustrating experience, all in all.
Movement is where the cracks show most clearly. A stealth game lives and dies on how it feels in the navigate space, and despite the appreciated addition of a grappling hook and glider, traversal rarely feels fluid. Animations are stiff, transitions between climbing and perching lack smoothness, and there’s a persistent sense of input lag between intention and action. In a series that once thrived on carefully reading patrol routes and slipping between sightlines, that slight disconnect becomes exhausting over time.
The expanded environments should have been the headline improvement. They’re larger, more vertical, and visibly more ambitious. On paper, that sounds like exactly what Styx needed. In practice, the scale exposes how uneven the mechanics are. When the act of climbing a tower or moving across rooftops feels awkward, the sandbox's size becomes a liability. Instead of empowering experimentation, the game often makes you hesitant to engage with its own spaces because you’re never fully confident the systems will behave cleanly.
Abilities return and expand, with amber powers complemented by new quartz-based tricks. But rather than feeling like meaningful evolutions of the stealth toolkit, they often come across as compensatory. You’re not using them to create elegant solutions; you’re using them to patch over moments where AI awareness spikes unpredictably or where level geometry behaves strangely. That subtle shift, from creative expression to damage control, is telling.
Visually, Blades of Greed occupies an uncomfortable middle ground. It carries the budget and scope of a modern release, yet much of its presentation recalls mid-tier PlayStation 3-era AA titles, and not in a charming, throwback way. Character models lack nuance, animations feel dated, and environmental detail swings between impressive exteriors and oddly sterile - or, conversely, convoluted and "busy" - interiors. Lighting, crucial in a stealth game, sometimes struggles with clarity, making exposure feel arbitrary rather than readable. When stealth depends on trust between player and system, that lack of clarity chips away at the experience.
Even the tone feels slightly adrift. Styx’s sardonic edge once grounded the series, but here it rarely elevates the narrative or sharpens the tension. The story framework exists, but it feels functional rather than compelling, moving you between objectives without building much momentum. Combined with the mechanical frustrations, it leaves the whole experience feeling heavier than it should.
Performance on Steam Deck with Styx: Blades of Greed is, bluntly, a mess. Even with every setting dragged to its absolute lowest, shadows pared back, textures dropped, post-processing stripped out, the frame rate refuses to behave. In quieter interior spaces, it might flirt with the mid-30s, but the moment you step into a wider area or anything remotely busy, it nosedives into the low 20s before scrambling back up again. The fluctuations are constant and distracting, making stealth, a genre that lives and dies on precision and timing, feel oddly unreliable.
You can claw back something resembling stability by forcing a 30fps cap through the Steam Deck’s performance menu, and for stretches it does hold… technically. But even then, the image quality introduces a new problem. There’s a strange, warping shimmer across surfaces, as though every texture is subtly shifting or reloading in real time. It creates an effect not unlike watching a 480p YouTube video that never quite finishes buffering: soft, smeared detail with a persistent, crawling instability. It’s not just low resolution; it feels unstable. The result is a compromised experience that looks and plays worse than it should, especially for a game that isn’t exactly pushing visual boundaries.
That 30fps cap does come with one major upside, though: efficiency. With the frame rate locked, power draw drops significantly, falling from the low 20-watt range down to roughly 12W. In practical terms, that translates to an estimated 4 hours of battery life during testing, a genuinely impressive turnaround compared to the barely 2 hours of drain seen when the system is left to run uncapped. It’s a rare case where reining in the game doesn’t just stabilise performance but also meaningfully improves portability.
Unfortunately, technical issues don’t stop at frame pacing. Multiple crashes occurred during the review period, necessitating full restarts. Even when the game was running, it was far from stable. Audio would intermittently crackle during busier scenes, while on a handful of occasions it simply cut out altogether, leaving entire stretches eerily silent until a reboot. Combined with the inconsistent visuals and erratic performance, it makes for a version of the game that feels not just unoptimised, but fundamentally unreliable on Valve’s handheld.
Very few accessibility options are available in Styx: Blades of Greed, with the present few being able to change the Colour Vision Deficiency Type, and further changing the severity and shift colour spectrum of said setting.
What makes Blades of Greed disappointing isn’t that it lacks ideas. The ambition is visible everywhere, in its scale, its expanded systems, and its attempt to modernise traversal. But ambition without refinement magnifies flaws. Where previous entries felt lean and focused, this one feels bloated and less confident in its own fundamentals.
For a series that once carved out a respectable niche in the stealth genre, this instalment feels strangely dated and less polished than what came before. Instead of a confident evolution, it lands as a reminder that scale and new mechanics mean little if the core feel isn’t there. Blades of Greed isn’t just underwhelming, it’s a frustrating step down from a formula that, until now, had at least known its own strengths.
このレビューはPC版に基づいています。
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Styx: Blades of Greed clearly has ideas and ambition, but it unfortunately lacks the refinement it needed to minimize its obvious flaws, and it's rough on the Steam Deck.
