Hmm, this had me look up Graham's reviews. The only games he reviewed that I've played are Mirror's Edge (at CVG), Mirror's Edge Catalyst, 80 Days, and Yoku's Island Express (well, I've played the demo).

I'd say his Mirror's Edge reviews were spot on - I liked the first game and loved the second, but the combat was absolutely the worst part of both games, and I would have enjoyed both more if they focused more on high-speed traversal, takedowns, and escape, rather than locking you in an area with lots of soldiers and requiring you to beat them all up. I played Catalyst well after release, and I think they patched some of the issues he brought up, which may explain why I had a better time with it.

His 80 Days review was similarly pretty accurate to my experience, though he loved it way more than I did. And based on the demo of Yoku's, I'm sure I'd enjoy that game just as much as he did.

Getting back to Styx, there were a lot of complaints about controls elsewhere too - PC Games had the same complaint, as did Riot Pixels, IncGamers, and Playstation UK. The people in the RPS comments who said the controls were fine played with mouse and keyboard (and also admitted that the explanation for how to hang from a ledge is only briefly mentioned in the tutorial), while Graham played with a controller, so maybe that made a difference? It may also have been an issue with the edge detection, which other reviewers noted.

The issue with the combat, as I understood it, was that getting caught by a guard locked you in combat - which you would likely lose - and that the combat noise would alert additional guards who would run up and attack you while you were still locked in combat with the first guard. People in the comments actually recommended playing on the hardest difficulty because it disabled the combat lock, so that you could instead run away as you should.

The issue with the backtracking is largely due to the budget, but I can see that being frustrating regardless.

Dishonored is the first game I played that got me into stealth, and made me fall in love with stealth gameplay. The notion of a non-lethal, no alert playthrough seemed tedious, difficult, and boring, and held no interest for me. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself doing a non-lethal, no alert playthrough, and absolutely loving every moment. I actually tried to go back and play violently, but I didn't enjoy it and quickly gave up - although I was amazed that a map that took hours with a stealth approach could be completed in minutes with violence, albeit missing tons of secrets along the way. So Dishonored is certainly the metric by which I judge other stealth games, but within the context that I actively avoided all combat in Dishonored. I know others love the point where your attempt at stealth fails and you have to become violent, but I considered such a failure unacceptable, and reloaded to continue my campaign of stealth. FWIW, Graham only mentioned Dishonored to say that Styx learned how to communicate information visually from it.

In any case, Styx certainly sounds like a 7/10 to me - a good game that's held back by poor textures, repetitive backtracking, possibly bad controls, and some frustrating design decisions. Good but somewhat janky. But if you say it's good, and recommend it for those who enjoy stealth games and gameplay, I'll add it to my wishlist and keep an eye out for it.

Do you happen to know how the sequel, Shards of Darkness, compares? Alec reviewed that one, and said that while it was a solid stealth game, it suffered from poor edge detection and platforming, and was marred by terrible jokes and characterization - poor humour, insulting without being funny, awful wisecracks, outdated references, 4th wall breaking humour, and a deeply unlikable main character. It thus compared poorly to the more polished stealth games available at the time. Or, as he put it, "Styx out of ten."

And, FWIW, I feel like every reviewer can be off. I usually have very similar tastes to John Walker, and am bothered by the same things, but he loved the Pheonix Wright games and found them hilarious, while I didn't find them funny at all (well, I did laugh once during the first game). And Alec found Sleeping Dogs enjoyable but utterly forgettable, and I largely dismissed the game based on his review, but user praise convinced me to play it and I absolutely loved it - and enjoyed it way more than GTA 4, which I found tedious, boring, a pain to play, and I really struggled to enjoy it, in start contrast to all the glowing praise it received from reviewers (98 on Metacritic). I stopped playing GTA 4 half way through, when I realized that I wasn't enjoying myself and wasn't having fun. I actually thought that maybe I just didn't like open-world games, since here was one of the best ones and I didn't like it. But then I played Sleeping Dogs and had a blast, and realized that I just didn't like GTA 4. I'll take Sleeping Dog's 81 over GTA 4's 98 any day. :)