Styx: Shards of Darkness

I suppose it isn't that surprising that Styx: Shards of Darkness is so much like Styx: Master of Shadows. Why try to fix something that isn't broken. Still, I wasn't expecting it to follow the same formula to this degree and to retain so many of the old features -- some of which I'm not that fond of. There are few improvements and some whole new things too, though.

A very iterative sequel

You can again replay completed missions from your hideout and new progress counts towards the current playthrough. There are again four insignias in each mission to be unlocked for more skill points. The Thief insignia still even has 10 tokens per map. The whole thing is so arcadey but I guess the series isn't really attempting to be an immersive sim. It's foremost a stealth game that puts challenge above all else.

Like in Master of Shadows, I played each mission twice: first for Thief and Shadow (no alerts) insignias and then Mercy (no humanoid kills) and Swiftness (speed) on replays. Mercy was bit of a puzzle as there are mandatory assassination objectives and there didn't appear to be non-lethal solutions like in Dishonored. But evidently killing the targets is fine for the insignia.

I don't quite remember if the first game had a skill upgrade that revealed the thief tokens on levels. Shards however has Greed as one of the ultimate skill options for Perception tree. Once the skill is unlocked, tokens show up as dots on the screen while Amber Vision is active. Thus finding them with it is a whole lot less painful than following a guide or looking for them normally.

The earliest you can get Greed is mission 3 where you find your first piece of pure quartz. In hindsight, I should've waited until I got the skill before going for the thief insignias of the early missions. That would've saved some time. Shards of Darkness is considerably shorter than Master of Shadows, though. It took me only 26 hours to 100% it while Master took 40. That's probably due to fewer maps -- there are only ever two per mission opposed to up to 4 per mission in the previous game. And even then Shards reuses maps.

Verticality continues to be a big part of level design but I think I liked the first game's architecture more. There are fewer bottle necks on the levels of this game too. Some might think that's a good thing but in my opinion it was cool in Master of Shadows to be forced sometimes to inch forward lest a bunch of nasty bugs get alerted or a sleeping troll by a doorway smashes you into bits. In Shards you don't need to be as careful, I feel.

My favorite map in this game was in mission 6 where Styx gets stuck inside an elven temple of sorts and has to complete rites of passage to get out. Styx can cheat a bit in them with his new abilities: he can now craft cocoons which when thrown, spawn a clone at the location. Another new skill allows him to rebirth as the clone, thus making him able to cross gaps that he can't normally jump over. The rebirth ability is useful in other maps too when going for the Swiftness insignia. You can avoid some backtracking by leaving a clone hidden behind as a teleport location.

Elves no longer have the proximity detection they had in Master of Shadows, although I'm not sure if the dark elves in this one are the same elves. Regardless, as enemies it makes dark elves identical to humans. Instead a new acquaintance, dwarves, are able to smell you when near. Oddly enough in the same map they're introduced, you (can) get a recipe for a scent masking potion which completely negates the dwarf special ability. You can also craft acid traps which make armored enemies less of a puzzle than they were in the previous game.

These new options probably help if you try to play the game in co-op. I'm not entirely sure how dying works with two players (like is one death instant mission restart?) but I assume you want to avoid detection as much as possible because combat is still very dangerous.

Cyanide Studio fixed the two issues I had with platforming in the previous game. Styx no longer automatically climbs up a ledge; jump to hang is the default action now. Dropping to hang is smoother too as you don't need to crouch walk over a ledge in Shards to grab to it. You just hold RMB which doesn't slow you down. Otherwise parkour appeared to have transitioned without changes into the newer Unreal Engine. I had some trouble with traversing some handhold paths but that was probably due to diagonal aiming being fiddly with WASD. Drop assassination was also still tricky compared to the Dishonored games.

I've seen people saying Shards of Darkness looks better than its predecessor but I don't see much of a difference myself. FOV slider was a surprise but the more options there are, the better. However, Cyanide could've tweaked the default UE4 graphics settings that group things together and have unhelpful labels such as 'Epic'. If I set anti-aliasing to Epic, what does that mean exactly? Nonetheless, the game ran well for me on maxed settings.

The gameplay is fine and I think whether a fan of the genre likes it or not comes down to if they can tolerate the protagonist. Styx is still the same swearing, joke-cracking goblin. His voice actor (Saul Jephcott) did a good job but the common 4th wall breaking lines might be too much for someone. Styx's monologue is genuinely funny at times too, though. The soundtrack is also quite nice. I especially liked the cello-heavy tracks.

One thing I almost forgot: before buying the single piece of DLC (The Akenash Set) that is available, check that you don't already have the DLC dagger and outfit available in-game like I had. It would be a shame to pay extra 3€ for nothing. I'd argue that the items aren't worth the money in any case -- I never used them.