Games worth discovering

I expected more from the minds behind Dead Space - The Callisto Protocol Review

23K View2022-12-06

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the sting of wasted potential this keenly. The Callisto Protocol comes from great genes; the developers at Striking Distance Studios reportedly includes around thirty people who previously worked on the Dead Space series, including Glen Schofield, who is often credited as the creator of that excellent survival horror franchise. And from all the early buzz and trailers, it appeared as though The Callisto Protocol would be a natural extension of Dead Space, a spiritual successor with a new setting and top-of-the-line visuals.

But as the mutated monstrosities of The Callisto Protocol prove, sometimes messing with genetics can be a disaster. This game wears its inspiration on its sleeve, but it fails to even replicate the past success of Dead Space, much less surpassing it.

The Callisto Protocol stars a more or less personality-free hero named with the stunningly bland name of Jacob Lee. Jacob is a sci-fi freight jockey; together with his partner, Max, he takes jobs delivering packages across the solar system and doesn’t ask any questions. The game opens with Lee about to drop a shipment off on Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter, when suddenly his cargo ship is attacked by a fringe terrorist group, and he crash-lands onto the planet below. Before long, Jacob finds himself exploring the dreary halls of Black Iron Prison, an isolated gulag where the worst of the worst are tossed away...and where a mysterious outbreak seems to have started turning the prisoners into terrifying monsters.

This serves as a by-the-books but totally reasonable setup for a horror game. It’s essentially “Resident Evil in space,” as Schofield himself once described the Dead Space series. So far, so good, right?

The problems with The Callisto Protocol aren’t immediately obvious. For the first five or so hours of the game’s twelve- to fifteen-hour runtime, I largely enjoyed myself. The run-down prison setting isn’t the most original or awe-inspiring, and the zombified monsters mostly look like also-rans from previous survival horror games, but the overall sense of tension that I love in this genre was still there. I still had to scrounge for every last bullet and sweat in fear as I rounded every corner or opened every door.

If there’s a sign in the game’s first half that things are going to go downhill, it’s got to be in the bizarre focus on melee combat. For at least an hour or so, Jacob doesn’t have access to a gun and must fight enemies using an axe and then a stun baton stolen from a dead security guard. This isn’t abnormal for a survival horror game, but it struck me that the game has a whole system of dodges, blocks, and counterattacks built that it introduces, suggesting that melee will be a much bigger focus than I expected.

For what it’s worth, The Callisto Protocol’s melee mechanics work surprisingly well...as long as you’re only fighting enemies one-on-one. The second that two or more enemies are attacking at once, dodging and targeting melee hits properly becomes an absolute mess. And the deeper I got into the game, the more often I found myself thrown up against increasingly absurd numbers of opponents in groups that felt custom-built to demonstrate the weaknesses in the game’s clunky, slow combat.

Of course Jacob does get guns eventually, but they come with their own problems. Most notably, swapping between weapons requires using the direction pad if you’re playing on console or with a controller, which feels awful and unreliable. In fact, the controls broadly just feel off.

Accidentally tap down on the d-pad, and Jacob flinches and begins to enter the animation for using healing items. Want to shoot a gun? Be careful, because if you accidentally press the right trigger before pressing down on the left trigger to aim, Jacob will get stuck in a melee strike animation, likely ruining your chances at a clean shot if not leading to your death altogether. There’s this sense of lack of polish to the controls that I haven’t experienced in a triple-A game in years.

It’s not just the controls either. The back half of the game features level and encounter design that feel like an amateur’s first game project, not a title put together by dozens of industry veterans.

Here’s the most egregious example: In the third-to-final chapter, Jacob goes toe to toe with one of The Callisto Protocol’s two boss encounters. But before the boss showed up, I had to fight through wave after wave of one of the toughest “regular” enemies in the game. I had to kill sixteen of them in total, one after the other. I counted. And when I inevitably died many times during this process, the checkpoint was infuriatingly set just far enough back that any ammo and upgrade purchases at the in-game shop had to be repeated before the fight.

My reward for finally getting through sixteen tough enemies that ate through my ammunition was an intense boss fight against an enemy that could basically one-hit-kill Jacob. The only viable strategy was to run around, getting the boss trapped going around boxes in the environment so that I could stop and take a couple quick potshots at him before repeating this process. Over and over.

My relief and elation from finally defeating this boss was short-lived: In the second-to-last chapter, I had to fight him again. And in the final chapter...haha, yeah, he showed up again. Twice.

I was shocked and annoyed at the repeated boss fight the first time he showed up again, a mere forty minutes or so after my first encounter. By the fourth time, it was all I could do to not turn off my PlayStation in disgust.

I feel like I could go one for dozens of more paragraphs with endless examples of the ways that The Callisto Protocol let me down. There’s tons of unnecessary backtracking. The game always finds absurd excuses to separate Jacob and any friendly characters so that the friendly AI never has to join in for combat. The boneheaded story has players repeating the same obvious plot points multiple times over, acting each time as if this “twist” that was obvious from the start is a major revelation.

Perhaps worst of all, The Callisto Protocol wears the skin of classic science fiction stories that turn a critical eye towards society and culture, but it has none of the heart. The writing is clearly aping ideas from movies like Alien and The Thing. But even though it’s set inside of an unethically run prison and features a corrupt corporate government, it can’t muster up the courage to actually say anything beyond some generic observations about facing your mistakes.

Of course, the truth is that if The Callisto Protocol were as fun to play as the first two Dead Space games were, I wouldn’t really care that it’s a big, dumb horror story that doesn’t have much depth to it. Those games weren’t super deep either, but they were a blast. That The Callisto Protocol ends up so roundly unfun on top of all of its other weaknesses is unforgivable and a damn shame.

SCORE: 2 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Dead Space (particularly the first two). The Callisto Protocol is clearly building on the formula the developers established in the Dead Space games a decade ago. Just...don’t expect it to be too successful and doing so.

• The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This is a bit of a throwback, but some of the prison portions of The Callisto Protocol brought to mind the best prison escape game ever made, 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. The difference is that this game is less ambitious and somehow has worse stealth sections than a game based on a Vin Diesel movie. Wild.

💬 What’s a game that you were eagerly awaiting and ended up being super disappointed with? Share your story in the comments below!

Mentioned games

The Callisto Protocol™

8.4

CinematicRobotsDarkSci-fiActionLinearRealisticHorror

Get

Comments

😈 JINYI 🔴⚽🎧🎮

Aren't these two protagonists the actors in The Boys?

2022-12-09

Author liked

Kef Author

the female lead is Karen Fukuhara who I know is in The Boys! not sure about anyone else in here. The acting is solid, even if the script doesn't give them much to do

2022-12-09

Open TapTap to view 2 more replies

Ken Joseph

this game rocks, I don't know what the fuck some of you gamers want. this game has some of the best gameplay, with some of the best graphics, and it's real smooth. what the fuck you want ?

2022-12-07

Kef Author

I disagree that it's some of the best gameplay and that it's smooth. Have you finished it yet? I was pretty positive on it for the first half as I mentioned in this review, but it gets much worse as it goes.

2022-12-08

Open TapTap to view 1 more reply