I didn’t expect a lot from The Callisto Protocol – just a solid survival action game. I didn’t expect it to be as amazing as the first Dead Space, didn’t even expect it to be that much better than Dead Space 3, in ways in which it could be better at least. And after the disastrous launch when the game was entirely unplayable on PCs I’ve lowered my expectations even further. But the game still managed to disappoint.
So what is The Callisto Protocol and why is everyone comparing it to Dead Space? It’s a survival action game set in the future where a strange alien mutation is taking over a space prison facility on one of the moons of Jupiter. Which is apparently one of the original ideas for the setting of the first Dead Space – a fact not surprising given that several key narrative and design people who worked on that game directed this project as well. So, comparisons are unavoidable, but while direct ones do not favor The Callisto Protocol, a lot of things this project does differently are at least curious.
One thing that I personally did not expect was that this title is almost entirely focused on melee combat instead of the ranged one. You do get guns and you can, at least by the end of the game and on easier difficulties, use almost exclusively guns, but that’s clearly not the intended approach. Instead, the title feels like someone taking The Evil Within (the original one), attempting to mix it with the close quarters combat from Uncharted 4 and then adding some Dead Space flavour on top. And the result is… not something I found fun whatsoever. Essentially, every time enemies get close to you you’re locked on and enter a melee combat mode which you can get out of, but the game is sticky enough to not let you do it easily. And the combat involves timing hits and using a dodge (by default tied to the left or right movement directions) until the enemy is dead. When you get guns you also get a chance to put in a few shots when the enemy is stunned, but it’s never consistent even when helpful.
You do get other ways of dealing with enemies, like the telekinetic glove, except unlike Dead Space it’s limited in usage and extremely clunky to use. Or the stealth kills that, for whatever reason, don’t work on some enemies at all, but for some are so easy to do you never try anything else. Stealth here is extremely fake, so if the game wants the enemies to know where you are, they will know where you are even if they are not immediately aggressive – they will just slowly home exactly on your location.
Most of the time the combat is just really tedious and boring, unless you cheese it by either focusing on removing enemy legs and then just killing them on the ground, or, where possible and if you’ve upgraded it, use the telekinetic grip to just “remove” enemies from the location. There’s no fun nuance to any of it – you either like the combat from the second it’s introduced, or you’re bored (and frustrated) throughout the rest of the game.
The exploration isn’t any better either. The game is shockingly bad at hinting about what might be the “intended path” and what is a “side path”, apart from a few moments where it almost establishes a convention, only to forget about it later. There’s no map or the holographic pointer which you can use to see where you have to go and avoid doing so until you’ve explored the rest of the location. And that combines with the rather poor checkpoint system – it’s only automated, it only works once per checkpoint spot and if you’ve realized that you’re going the intended way, then decided to backtrack to investigate an optional location and then died somewhere before the next checkpoint happens – you’ve lost all that time. Not that a lot of side paths are worth it anyway, as they usually contain nothing of note apart from potential lore elements.
And speaking of the story – it’s trash. It follows the Dead Space general premise almost exactly, changing only the names and exact circumstances, but lacks any deep implications or memorable characters, being just a surface level retelling of the exact same premise. It basically fits the “we have Dead Space at home” meme format to a T. Though at least visually it’s neat. It’s hard to praise modern titles built on modern engines for looking good, because it’s extremely easy to achieve more often than not, but the tech art work and visual designs in The Callisto Protocol are genuinely good.
If you can run the game. Because the game, even after the patches that made it playable, still runs like crap. Don’t even consider enabling the Ray Tracing – the way it’s implemented won’t run on any modern system without destroying the performance entirely and, in fact, unless they fix it it might never run well. And while the shaders are pre-calculated on the start of the game now, it doesn’t stop the game from lagging during some transitions, when a huge new chunk of data needs to be streamed in quickly, and it can happen even in combat, when you least want it. So you can add “dying to bad performance” to the list of potential problems.
Thing is – apart from looking good, The Callisto Protocol is just average at its best moments. But most of the time it’s tedious and/or frustrating. And despite the direct relations to Dead Space, it actually reminded me a lot more of Afterfall: Insanity – a not particularly great Polish attempt to create a Dead Space game in the early 2010s that, if I’m being completely honest, was far more entertaining and interesting than this. I never expected to be recommending Afterfall: Insanity over anything, but here we are – even if you get The Callisto Protocol running well on your system (and they improve it further with patches), it’s just not worth your time.