This game actually manages to bring back Lovecraftian horror in a decent manner and (as far as I can tell right now) doesn't have the issues that often plagued other titles in this genre. Lots of cool ideas and the overall decent state of the game makes me believe that this game could actually shine to its full potential on its release. I did come across a few bugs here and there, but thats to be expected for an Early-Access title. For example the voicelines in conversations tend to echo at their beginning and then cut off shortly before completion. Sometimes they don't play at all. Also I truly hope that they implement other types of AA, besides UE5s TSR and DLAA solutions. These are known to generate nasty artifacts and cause performance issues (which I can fully confirm). Generally speaking I hope the developers actually take enough time for optimization and don't just release it unoptimized with out of the box solutions like most studios do nowadays. Well, time will tell. For now it is looking pretty good and i'm excited to follow the games progress until its scheduled release in 2026.
words can't describe how confusing and overloaded with hallf-baked mechanics this game is
Interesting story and a cool concept. The mechanics and gameplay however aged poorly. The gunplay is way to clunky for the game to rely that heavily on gunfights after the first few hours.
The Game itself is a decent shooter with good graphics, but it suffers severly from the fact, that it's everything BUT a F.E.A.R title. It completely cuts ties with F.E.A.R and F.E.A.R 2 with a completely different gameplay, artstyle and a overall feeling. Regardless of how hard you may try to ignore it you just can't look over the ridiculous COD and Resident Evil like gamedesign. It does not fit into the F.E.A.R franchise at all and it doesn't even seem to remotely try to. The Co-op is a nice feature but oh well.... it also doesn't fit to what a F.E.A.R title is supposed to be. If I had to point out the worst things about this whole mess, it would probably be: - The absolute break with established titles - The fact that it plays like an arcade game - The complete butchering of the story (it's an absolute mess) - A lot of well known characters get butchered aswell (poor Becket) - Movie Sequences... just why??? It kills the immersion - Main character has a (fugly) face now (He looks like Leon Kennedy mixed with the Undertaker) - Bad balancing (half of the weapons are useless and they still don't seem to know how a shotgun works apparently) - Lackluster AI (They feel worse compared to the older titles) - "Phase commanders". That enemy type mainly exists to straight up trash-talk you and be a massive A-hole progression blockade and I'm not even exaggerating at that point. - EVERYTHING in this game just yells "LOOK, I'm a F.E.A.R title. we have the story and the characters from the older games!" and it absolutely fails to sell it. TLDR: It is supposed to be F.E.A.R but it's not. It's just a generic COD & Resident Evil hybrid with a label slapped ontop of it and a poorly written story to justify it. I feel kind of bad for the developers because they certainly are skilled, but probably got hit up with the wrong project / franchise and that actually killed the company along with the whole F.E.A.R franchise aswell. 1 star extra to pay respect to the devs efforts.
The idea and concept of Styx and the games world itself is actually very interesting and appears to be well thoght out. However this only rises my disappointment, since the devs absolutely butchered this good concept with bad-to-mediocre game mechanics which suffer from clunky implementations and common bugs. I got to a point where i basically had no motivation to play this game any further. In comparison to other games based around stealth (Dishonored, AC, etc.), Styx: Master of Shadows absolutely tanks in several categories: Combat: The games approach on combat is an absolute disaster. It is poorly implemented and solely consists of Quicktime-Events, which mostly fail because of bugs. I get that this game revolves around stealth, but thats not an excuse to make the combat an absolute mechanical nightmare, which essentially makes getting spotted a death-sentence. Even fleeing from fights isn't possible! Levels/maps: The levels are beautifully designed, but get repetetive pretty quickly. There's also alot of recycling during the later stages of the game. Parkour/Movement: The controls and movement can be quite clunky and buggy. Sometimes Styx climbs up ledges without the player actually pressing a button, sometimes he somehow doesn't grab a ledge which results in his death and the game does a poor job at explaining the mechanics. For example Styx wont climb ledges automatically if you press spacebar a little bit longer. Also Styx will automaticly hold onto ledges if you walk off of them while pressing shift. All mechanics that are not explained well enough by the game. Stealth: The stealth mechanic seems to be working just fine mostly. Sometimes dark areas don't trigger Styxs tattoo's, while some bright areas sometimes do. Also sometimes enemies seem to have eagle eyes. Conclusion: Great concept, but frustrating to play due to serious gameplay-issues.
