Styx, the foul-mouthed goblin assassin/thief, has finally returned after a lengthy nine-year break for a new adventure. It’s a surprising comeback for a niche stealth series, and while it’s undeniably good to see the grumpy goblin back in action, Styx: Blades of Greed feels more like a cautious reintroduction than a triumphant return. It’s a more forgiving, slightly more aggressive take on the formula — solid and enjoyable in the moment — but one that plays things frustratingly safe in both structure and storytelling.

Available On: Xbox, PlayStation, PCReviewed On: PS5Developed By: Cyanide StudioPublished By: Nacon

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Surprisingly, the game picks up directly from the previous entry’s cliff-hanger ending. That’s a bit confusing when you don’t actually remember what happened in the last game, so firing up Blades of Greed felt like being thrown into an exam halfway through that I had not studied for. Why am I on a crashing zeppelin? Who the hell is this elf dude? It was almost a decade ago, and I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday. Help an old codger out, yeah?

One YouTube recap later and I was caught up — but it turns out I didn’t really need to be. For the most part, you can muddle through without much knowledge of the franchise, mostly because the characters are so bland that whatever came before barely even matters.

The general plot sees Styx, alongside Helledryn and Djarak, attempting to keep a powerful new resource called Quartz out of the Inquisition’s hands. Your companions have their own motivations for sticking together, even if the game doesn’t do much to explore them, while Styx once again occupies the anti-hero role. He can absorb Quartz’s power and it’s addictive as hell, so naturally he just wants the next fix. The fact that it keeps yacking to him everytime he absorbs is a problem he happily ignores until it smacks him upside the head.

On paper, Styx’s companions should be the most interesting part of the story. After all, he’s a loner. Pairing him with an Orc shaman, a Dwarf engineer and a Dark Elf feels like fertile ground for conflict and character development. Instead, this rich narrative soil is left largely unplanted. They mostly just… get along. There’s little friction until much later, and when the minor tension does arrive, it lacks impact because the characters themselves are underdeveloped. There’s a faint hint of the dysfunctional found-family trope here, but it never truly blossoms, either. They don’t like each other, they don’t hate each other – why are they together?

Outside of Styx himself, the voice acting doesn’t help matters. Minor NPCs — especially guards you eavesdrop on for information — deliver their lines with an awkward stiffness. The dialogue often feels deliberately hokey, but the performances land squarely in hokey-in-a-bad-way territory. Even the main companions aren’t much better. Flat delivery is the biggest issue, particularly with Djarak, and Wren’s voice never quite fits the character’s design. Overall, the narrative never delivers that precision knife to the ribs. It’s fine. It exists. But everything ultimately comes down to the sneaking.

And thankfully, the sneaking is still enjoyable.

This is a faster-paced rendition of Styx. Previous entries demanded careful study of patrol routes and meticulous planning — including deciding the perfect moment to yack in someone’s food so they die a horrible death. Here, Styx is more agile from the outset. There’s a double jump available almost immediately, letting you bounce around dense environments with ease. You can get away with more, recover from mistakes more easily, and generally play a little looser.

Aside from that, it’s business as usual: hide in shadows, duck into lockers, dangle from rooftops, and wait for that perfect moment to either slip past unseen or perform an emergency spinal tap via dagger. Kills can be brutal and noisy or slower and quieter, depending on your preference. It’s always satisfying to murder your way through an entire section, or move through it perfectly undetected like navigating your way through the awkward family BBQ to the burgers without getting spotted.

The enemy AI is fairly standard stealth fare. If you’re spotted, guards investigate, shuffle about suspiciously for a while, and eventually wander back to their patrol routes. There’s little dynamic escalation or adaptation. And it’s always hilarious to how quickly they will accept the random deaths of their colleagues via dropped chandelier or poisoning as a freak accident before leaving the corpse there and going back to work. It works, but it rarely surprises. Heavier enemies and armoured brutes at least require a bit more creativity. You can’t just dart in for a quick stab, so you’re encouraged to drop chandeliers on their heads, poison nearby food, or use Styx’s powers to strip their armour before finishing them off. It’s a welcome wrinkle, even if it doesn’t evolve much beyond that.

Tension overall is noticeably lower this time around. Styx’s expanded agility and more aggressive toolkit make both murdering and escaping easier. Getting spotted isn’t catastrophic. Ironically, it’s the clunky combat that pushes you back toward stealth. One-on-one fights are manageable thanks to the lock-on system, but the animations are stiff and awkward enough that you’ll usually decide discretion is the better part of goblin valor. Mostly become goblin valor says stabbing from behind is the better part.

Styx can still create clones of himself, but there’s been a key change. You no longer directly control them unless you specifically activate his mind-control ability as well. Instead, clones are deployed more tactically — thrown onto enemies, tucked into hiding spots for ambushes, or even hurled at chandelier chains to trigger environmental kills. You lose some fine control, but in exchange you gain the ability to coordinate more fluidly with your own duplicate. I don’t think it’s either better or worse – just different.

Other powers are more of a mixed bag. Mind control is handy for clearing a path, especially once upgraded to allow you to force enemies into fatal drops. A blast ability that pushes foes away is serviceable, though combat is so clunky you’ll rarely want to rely on it. Slowing time proves more consistently useful, whether slipping past patrols or quickly dismantling a brute’s defences. In general, powers this time around skew more aggressive compared to previous games, which leaned more heavily into pure avoidance.

Once again, your powers and tools are limited in their use thanks to Amber and resources, both of which are surprisingly hard to find. On the one hand, I do admire the idea that this makes you play smarter and use your abilities only when needed. And yet, it also means you get to have less fun, and find yourself in situations where you don’t use your powers because you’re saving them for that one time you really need them. Except that time never comes. It’s like hoarding all the bloody potions in an RPG.

Upgrades are handled through skill trees enhancing Amber and Quartz abilities alongside more mundane tools like acid traps and throwing darts. Completing main missions is the primary way to grow stronger, though collectible emblems scattered through the levels offer bonus XP, giving you a reason to explore a little. It’s functional progression, if not particularly exciting.

One change that doesn’t work as well is the quick-access wheel system. Each wheel lets you assign up to four abilities, but additional wheels are locked behind optional fetch quests. As you unlock new powers, you’ll either be constantly pausing to reshuffle abilities or begrudgingly tackling dull side objectives just to expand your loadout.

The fetch quests themselves don’t help matters. Mission instructions are often obtuse, pointing you toward a vague location only for the item to actually be somewhere adjacent that you would never have guessed. It feels unnecessarily fiddly.

That criticism extends to the broader structure of the game. Much of Blades of Greed revolves around gathering chunks of Quartz from three main open zones, returning to the zeppelin for a cutscene, completing a linear mission, and then repeating the process. It’s a loop that becomes predictable fairly quickly.

Now, to be fair, you can reduce almost any game objective to a fetch quest if you try hard enough. Even Lord of the Rings is technically just a fetch quest in reverse. The difference is that many games disguise that structure with more variety or narrative momentum. Here, the seams show.

The three main zones themselves are large and open, encouraging exploration and multiple routes to objectives. Interestingly, enemies you eliminate remain dead across missions within those areas, at least until the next chapter starts. That persistence removes any long-term downside to wholesale slaughter, since clearing a zone makes future visits dramatically easier. New enemies spawn for specific missions, but they’ll casually wander around the corpses of their colleagues as if waiting for management to finally hire a clean-up crew.

There are multiple ways to approach objectives, though they rarely feel dramatically distinct. It’s usually a choice between climbing a different wall, slipping through a different vent, or entering through another doorway. The freedom is welcome in the moment, but replay value feels somewhat limited unless you impose your own self-restrictions.

Visually, the areas are distinct enough to avoid fatigue. A ramshackle lower city gradually gives way to pristine upper districts, a jungle teems with literal bugs and orcs, and the ruins of Akanash loom as a reminder of past events. It’s not breathtaking, but it’s varied.

Technically, the game sits firmly in that single-A-to-double-A space. There’s a faint layer of jank to animations and presentation — nothing catastrophic, but noticeable. A few minor bugs crop up, such as guards failing to properly resume patrol routes and pacing endlessly instead. Framerate is generally stable during normal gameplay, though it dips noticeably when using the fast-travel balloon between zones.

For all its flaws, I did enjoy the verticality this time around. There’s ample room to climb, leap, and lurk in rafters. The level designers clearly understand that stealth games live and die by spatial layering, and in that respect Blades of Greed succeeds. As you go through the story you gradually get handed new tools that open up more areas to explore, adding a tiny dash of metroidvania to all the murdering and plotting.

After nine years in the shadows, it’s undeniably good to have Styx back. Blades of Greed delivers solid stealth, satisfying verticality, and just enough mechanical evolution to keep things interesting. But it also plays things frustratingly safe. The story lacks bite, the structure leans heavily on uninspired repetition, and the presentation never quite escapes its rough edges.

There’s fun to be had here — especially if your preferred stealth philosophy involves leaving no witnesses — but after so long away this isn’t the big comeback Styx could of had. Instead, it’s a competent return that sneaks back onto the scene rather than kicking the door down.