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A shallow attempt as a predecessor to Dead Space

4K View2022-12-03

The Callisto Protocol (Reviewed)

Developer: Striking Distance Studios

Publisher: KRAFTON, Inc.

Released: Dec 2, 2022

Price: $60 USD

The Callisto Protocol is a raw and brutal sci-fi survival horror with physical, challenging, visceral combat. You play as Jacob Lee shortly after having crash landed on the moon of Callisto, while ferrying a very volatile unlabeled shipment that was going to be his and his partner Max's final haul before their retirement.

You'll have to survive to escape the many horrors of Callisto that you will find as you try to uncover the dark secrets of Jupiter’s dead moon.

Isn't this just Dead Space?

Pretty much

The creator of the original Dead Space series Glen Schofield is head director of development. Dead Space is owned and licensed by EA so the only way for them to make a new game is by a new team and under a new name.

Dead Space was a sublime horror and tension-packed game back in the day that always had you at the edge of your seat, this type of gameplay is missing.

It feels inadequate from a narrative point of view and its linear structure with dated game design. The jump scares are blatantly obvious.

The Callisto Protocol effectively tries so much to be like Dead Space, that it fails to be unique in any way. All of the elements from the franchise are in this game from the Kinesis ability to crafting weapons and stomping monsters.

It's all been done before and better.

What are some of the negative things surrounding this game?

The game runs on Denuvo DRM

Denuvo is an anti piracy software that has always been easy to crack. This is completely useless and just hogs your computer's resources, especially if you don't have that great of a computer. This causes a multitude of issues from performance loss, stuttering and ultimately errors and crashing.

Extreme stutter and inability to play at a high setting

Stuttering issues are typically CPU-related, which is interesting in this case given that the game uses the much derided Denuvo, which has been proven time and time again to have many issues with many games utilizing it.

The developers have stated that they are in the works of a patch to remedy this, but tons of players are refunding the game, slamming them with bad reviews.

Dying doesn't always have a death cutscene

Might not seem like much of an issue, but the game seems to think you're in a cutscene when you die abruptly before the creature has a chance to trigger.

This effectively puts you into a black screen for 6-7 seconds waiting for the scene that will never play to finish playing before you reload to your recent checkpoint. It definitely needs to be fleshed out as it's a time waster.

Death cutscenes are rather repetitive and not that unique

You might get an arm ripped off, your head torn off, eyes gouged out or even your face ripped off, but after it's been done so many times it honestly gets silly and repetitive, when it's the same monster and the same QTE cutscene.

In one death the upper part of your head might be torn off, but the way it was torn off leaves some room for questioning when it was your lower jaw being stretched like a silly putty and logically is the first thing that would be ripped off.

There is an awful lot of climbing through vents

It gets very repetitive sitting there watching Jacob shuffle his way through vent after vent getting from one location to another oftentimes with little happening.

Just reached a checkpoint? Upgraded some weapons? Progress and then die?

Let's hope that you just made it to the next location, or else have fun with the punishing and unnecessary back tracking to do everything you just did again due to how the game registers saves files at the start of every location.

Think of it like this; If you are on floor one, and then move to floor 2, your save will reload once you reach floor 2, regardless of where you save on floor 1.

But even if that was the only problem, if you upgrade, manually save, and then load, it still didn't save those upgrades that you just made.

How is the core combat gameplay?

It's honestly a little bit clunky at times

My biggest concern is how weak and out of breath Jacob gets after swinging and dodging in between each of his swings of a melee attack.

Considering he just opened a reinforced steel door with his bare hands while the power around the location is out, it just doesn't make any sense.

When the combat works it feels good

Combat consists of swinging your melee weapon while dodging creatures by holding down the (A) and (D) keys. You can also block light attacks with your (S).

In between each swing there are moments where you can get in a quick-shot of your equipped weapon to deal massive damage or to get some distance.

Fighting multiple targets at once in melee range is sporadic

If you find yourself in a situation where you have no ammo and no Kinetic charges and you need to fight multiple enemies in a tight corridor with melee, then you'll find yourself scratching your head while your character goes back and forth between targets until you either get blindsided or finish them off.

Taking examples from similar horror games, wouldn't it be more effective to gang up on you with grapples for some QTE to help remedy this situation?

The game offers a lot of variety in ways of getting around enemies

You can use kinetic powers to impale your enemies, explode canisters, shoot or straight up beat them to death with an electric baton. The latter tends to be the more satisfying choice, but as stated before the more sporadic thing to do.

Would you recommend this game?

In the game's current state? No

Even after the game gets patched to remedy some of the issues plaguing it, I don't see myself picking it back up for a while, as there are better games to play.

It rides heavily off of the success of Dead Space while not really introducing anything new besides a new cast of characters and relatively dated gameplay.

I personally don't tend to like horror games that much, but I can't even consider this horror or even scary. I have mostly nothing but complaints about this game.

This concludes my review of this game, while my opinions may be met with criticism, that's what makes gamers unique, you don't have to like the same things that others do, nor do you have to agree with them.

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- Pawkt

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