The Callisto Protocol can be seen as a spiritual successor to Dead Space, looking to pick up where the series left off mechanically and expand upon the sub-genre it created.
From the start, it’s clear the game has some great art design and graphics behind it, oozing with sci-fi horror aesthetic, and feels like a truly next-gen game. But unfortunately, clunky combat, pacing issues within the story and an over-reliance on the same jump scares result in a somewhat disappointing experience.
You play as Jacob Lee, a pilot tasked with delivering cargo to Black Iron Prison when your ship is boarded by terrorists and crash-lands. While being rescued, the prison warden decides you need to be locked away and hauls you off to a cell, not before having a chip brutally inserted into your neck, which – while handy for checking on Jacob's health – is quite the gory experience.
In no time, the prison goes into lockdown due to an outbreak which leaves you able to escape and sends you tumbling down the rabbit hole to uncover the truth of what’s going on.
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For the game's opening few hours, Jacob is equipped with melee weapons including a shiv and eventually a stun baton which will stay with you throughout your journey. As you face Biophages one on one, you’ll get a taste of what the combat is like: brutal, short and always upfront.
You're encouraged to get up close and personal with each Biophage you encounter, swinging at them with your weapon, taking limbs off along the way.
The problem occurs when you want to dodge or block attacks. This is handled by holding the directional stick either right or left to dodge and backwards to block. Sounds simple enough, but as it’s also your movement control, whether the game registers your desired action or not feels more up to luck than skill.
Combined with the fact that choosing the same direction twice results in you taking a hit as well, often you have no idea what will work and instead have to blindly swing the stick around and hope for the best. And it only gets worse as the game goes on. Enemies don't pull their punches either, most of them able to take you out in a few good hits.
The death animations are extremely gory and detailed, as if Quentin Tarantino decided to shift into the horror game space. Thanks to the combat's frustrations, though, they quickly become an annoying, unskippable setback as you try again and again.
Once Jacob gets his hands on some guns and the ‘Grip’ – a weapon that lets you to pick up enemies and send them into walls and spikes – the combat starts to feel a little more balanced, and this is when the game is at its most enjoyable, allowing you to pop some shots off to keep the Biophages at bay, in between swings of your baton, or send them off edges.
But it always feels like you’re flying by the edge of your seat and never in any real control in a technical sense, resulting in the horror coming from frustration and the fear of larger fights rather than the environment and atmosphere itself.
Enemies can evolve mid-fight, as tentacles appear from their chest to signify they’re about to mutate into a much faster, larger and stronger enemy. If you’re lucky enough to have ammo, you can simply shoot the tentacles and stop them in their tracks. But if you’re out? No such luck.
While you can still attack them with your baton, even if you take all their limbs off mid-transformation, they’ll simply evolve and be back at full health, only this time hitting several times harder.
These combat issues are compounded once you reach the second half of the game, where every encounter becomes focused on larger groups of enemies in wide-open spaces. The dodging mechanic is easily confused, assuming you were avoiding one enemy only to put yourself in the path of another. Jacob can’t quick-turn or really move around with any speed, so running from an encounter is often a no-no unless you get lucky with a few barriers to vault over in the right places.
Switching weapons is slow due to each needing to be disassembled and reassembled mid-fight, and using health requires Jacob to crouch and play out an animation.
This isn’t anything fans of something like the Dark Souls series would be shocked by, but when every enemy is always running full speed towards you, having to plan ahead and do things slowly doesn’t mesh with the high-octane action thrown your way.
Krafton The Callisto Protocol Day One Edition
Krafton The Callisto Protocol Day One Edition
Inventory is another curious issue within The Callisto Protocol. It isn't bad, but does feel a little unbalanced. Your inventory spaces are limited, meaning you’ll have to be mindful of what you’re carrying – with ammo, health injectors, blueprints for new weapons and scrap to sell for credits all competing for the same spaces.
The issue is, it’s never clear when you’ll next find a 3D printer to sell your items or drop off a blueprint. Sometimes they can be almost entire chapters apart.
Managing your inventory is par for the course in a survival horror title, but with the inability to backtrack and no storage of any kind, along with fights that can leave you overwhelmed, you’re sometimes left in a state of feast or famine through no fault of your own.
The game seems to have a sense of lost identity, as it struggles to decide if it wants to be a survival horror title or an all-out action one, and instead sort of fumbling both.
The narrative suffers in a similar way, offering breadcrumbs of what could have been an interesting story, such as secret rooms and intriguing little lines of dialogue that are too few and too far between the core gameplay, before it's quickly wrapped up moments before the end, making for a disappointing payoff.
On occasion, you can walk off the beaten track to find audio logs which aim to flesh out the world, but these are ultimately short and mostly uninteresting.
It's a shame that, despite looking great and having a good concept at its core, some poorly-executed ideas lead to a frustrating experience overall. For a new studio to produce a brand new IP is obviously a mammoth task and commendable, so here’s hoping the team get another chance to get a grip on this universe and tighten up the experience.
Platform reviewed on: Xbox Series X
The Callisto Project is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
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