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Callisto protocol review – Interesting things in an all-too-familiar space


Nearly a decade and a half ago, Visceral Games released Dead Space, a classic survival horror game inspired by games like alien and thing. If you’ve ever longed for a return to the mix of science fiction and horror, or if you want an experience that closely resembles Schofield’s first survival horror, you’re in luck. Schofield’s latest, the Callisto Protocol, is incredibly close to Dead Space, both for better and for worse. Unfortunately, though, it’s all too familiar. There are great flashes of light, specifically during its opening hours, but what follows is a grueling eight hours and unsurprisingly resembles a relic of the past.

The Callisto Protocol is set primarily in the Black Iron Prison and its surroundings on one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto. After an emergency landing, correctional officers imprisoned protagonists Jacob Lee and Dani Nakamura in the Black Iron Prison. Something went wrong; Jacob escapes from his cell, and soon, meets his first phage, a highly mutated monstrous creature whose blood is more pus-filled than a human.

The game introduces its unique melee combat system here, and that’s one of the highlights. The dodging by dragging left and right on the joystick is appealing, as are the strong and slow swings of Jacob’s melee attack. Each hit delivers a lot of impact, and with the right timing and precise dodges, I took down enemies with just this charged horn baton with satisfaction. The guns were then put into the mix, but they were not as satisfying as the baton, nor did they meaningfully distinguish them from each other. Upgrading my baton to keep it useful to the end is essential, although ammo is plentiful if you want to encounter flaming guns. The telekinesis-like drag-and-throw GRP system is useful and fun, but disappointingly there’s very little to do with it other than hurling enemies at the same three types of deadly machines, off ledges or ways. away from you.

You are asked by radio talk characters to go here and thereand as soon as you showed up, something went wrong and now you need to meet them at this alternate location. After a few hours, I was anticipating most of the story’s beats, while being fed the breadcrumbs of a larger story. Sure, things happen, but I rarely see an overall story about the game until the final hour, at which point it feels like a flurry of information. While Dani’s story, which weaves between Jacob’s story for the duration of the game, comes to a satisfying conclusion, Jacob’s story does not, ending with a scene that feels incredibly engaging and designed to make sure I buy the upcoming story DLC.

The final boss before this disappointing climax is a grueling and repetitive fight just like previous years; which every game has to include, even if it’s not necessary. This is not the only disappointing boss. They all make me feel empty and annoyed by the lack of difference. You fight the same type of enemy as the boss multiple times throughout the game, just in different arenas. Most bosses can kill you in one hit, which takes away the stress earned from survival horror. I’m not desperate for ammo or health packs to survive skins; I was just jogging to make sure its hits didn’t fall near me.

More to my disappointment was a bad checkpoint system. You have to redo the entire battle if you die due to an instant kill, even at the end of the boss battle. If you have to kill a few enemies before that battle, you need to do it again too. The same goes for ammo, audio logs, and other resources, even if you save right where you want to pick up after you die after doing this kind of preparation. Bad checkpoints also appear in standard enemy encounters, which quickly become stale.

Listening to the audio log, which adds some much needed flavor to the area you’re playing, requires you to stay in the log menu and you can’t move or search the environment while listening. The death animations are fun and gruesome, but they lack variety. They also have bugs, and some death scenes are much more enjoyable to watch as they unfold than others. For example, a phage pulling Jacob’s eyes out of their sockets is amazing. But watching the enemy knock Jacob to the ground in an unintentionally hilarious and anticlimactic ragdoll-like fashion is disappointing.

The gun animation, which plays when switching weapons, looks nice at first, but you have to agonize over each one to use the new weapon. If you aim too soon or hit reload during the animation, the sequence will end and the weapon you were using before making this change will revert. This gets annoying during tense encounters as I flip through my weapon numbers to find the right one. The unique quick-fire mechanism that automatically locks onto an enemy’s weak point at the end of a melee combo is a great addition to the combat system, but if your equipped weapon runs out of ammo or needs reloading and you don’t realize it, you just shoot and nothing happens, hurting you. The Callisto protocol dies by thousands of cuts like this.

However, these various issues aside, the Callisto Protocol is still doing a lot of the things that Dead Space has done, for better and for worse. And finally, there are moments of joy, even if, on the contrary, they bring real horror. I agree that the Callisto Protocol is another version of its spiritual predecessor, but it has trouble grasping even the basics. As a result, I was overwhelmed, annoyed, and frustrated. If you want anything more from this second crack to make a new sci-fi IP in the survival horror genre, or something starkly different that admits gaming has come as far as As of 2008, the Callisto Protocol is not your answer.

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