The Callisto Protocol Review

Let’s just get it out of the way; The Callisto Protocol comes from the mind of Glenn Schofield and friends, previously responsible for classic Xbox 360 horror title Dead Space. This spiritual successor takes heavy inspiration from all three Dead Space titles – both for better and worse – though it adds new ideas to the mix as well. It didn’t quite hit the highs we’d hoped for, but there’s still a lot to like here for those looking for a tense, gore-packed game.

We play as Jacob Lee, a space faring cargo transporter who, upon crash landing on Jupiter’s moon Callisto after a supposed terrorist attack about his craft, is thrown into Black Iron prison – an off-world, high security affair with not much in the way of willingness to listen to his pleas that he shouldn’t be here. Waking up a few hours later, it’s clear that shit has gone sideways and after aligning with fellow inmate Elias, we then follow Jacob’s story as he discovers the what, why, how, and who of the story.

I enjoyed the tale told here, with Josh Duhamel (Jacob) and Karen Fukuhara (Dani) delivering solid performances throughout. Duhamel especially made Jacob stand out, with his likeness incredibly well represented in the game. In fact, the entire cast, set of locales, and sheer visceral scenes we bear witness too are easily The Callisto Protocol’s stand out highlight. Using Unreal Engine 4 (with some upgrades), Striking Distance have crafted one of the best looking games we’ve ever seen. The ‘digital humans’ are incredibly lifelike, sweat and blood reflecting the harsh lighting beautifully, while armour and rooms pack an insane level of detail.

Faces express with ultra-realism, and the gruesome nature of the Biophage enemies really puts the engine to work; the sinew-y, fleshy nature of the creatures comes across even from a distance and even more so should we be foolish enough to let one get the better of us. Of course, this extends to the death animations that – for our money – are a good mix of hilariously cartoon levels of violence combined with actually quite horribly detailed effects. Get on the wrong side of a Two-Head and we’re treated to a scene that could be straight out of a new Mortal Kombat.

So, the story’s decent and it looks utterly stunning, but what about the gameplay? Well, here is where we start to sour slightly on things. The Callisto Protocol tries some new things to compliment the standard gun combat to a mixed success rate. As you may know, this is a survival horror of sorts and so there’s a heavy emphasis on resource management, crowd control, and knowing when to take a step back and regroup: all things we’ve enjoyed in games before, but here, there’s something that just doesn’t quite sit right throughout.

Particularly in the opening hour or two, we found The Callisto Protocol to be almost frustratingly hard thanks to slow movement and seemingly sluggish controls. Early enemies were beating the life out of us (often literally) and the use of a counter dodge moveset felt ill-defined and awkward. When an enemy attacks, holding left or right will see Jacob dodge that way to avoid being hit. In theory it’s actually super overpowered thanks to him pulling some serious Matrix moves as long as we’re holding the direction. There’s no need to time our inputs, the only caveat being we can’t dodge the same way twice, which leads to Jacob pulling a Muhammed Ali at times, ducking and weaving all over the place.

That dodge ability will come to be one of the most important tools in our bag of tricks, but as I said, in theory it’s overpowered. In reality, dodging is only going to get us so far and at some point we have to fight back. Jacob is equipped early on with a wrench – and later an electric baton – that can be used to smash enemies about. The wrench though is woefully weak and the few times we are faced with more than one Biophage at a time with it can be an exercise is attrition. Things improve when we find the baton but the game balances this out by making the enemies hard to kill and more numerous. It’s also not long until we find various guns to use, as well as the GRP device; a handheld contraption that allows us to levitate enemies for a moment before launching them into spike walls or spinning turbines. Everything mentioned so far can be upgraded and reforge stations provided we have the credits to do so, and man, we need all the help we can get.

Enemies are tough and numerous but our main issue with the combat is the weighty, lengthy animations that play out. Melee attacks are brutal but slow, and even once we’ve unlocked stronger attacks they still feel as though we’re always on the back foot with enemies just waiting for us to exit our animation so they can pounce, knowing we can’t turn and face them quick enough to defend ourselves.

Changing guns is also frustrating for the same reasons. Jacob takes an age to stow one gun and grab another even when using the quick swap, while the assault rifle and shotgun use the same chassis with interchangeable attachments. We’ve lost count of the times we’ve been two thirds through the animation only for an enemy to hit us meaning our gun swap option didn’t finish. This was especially noticeable in the final fight where – no spoilers – the boss’s attack timing was just off enough to make swapping to a gun with ammo a pain in the ass.

There are a handful of mini-boss fights too, and all of them commit the same sin – one-hit deaths. Jacob runs slowly at the best of times, let alone when he’s injured, and dodging isn’t the best option as getting close enough to do so usually means death. Get even grazed by one of these and we are presented with a grim, lengthy animation before reloading at the most recent checkpoint.

Speaking of which, these are handled poorly. While they are at least fairly frequent, they tend to kick in before we’ve had a time to prepare for the next room fully. One area – coincidentally one with an aforementioned one-hit kill mini boss – saw us need to slowly reload our guns and refill our health every damn time we died, which was a lot. Manual saves don’t help either as they load from the same checkpoints. Of course, we could have been more on top of our ammo and health but again they kick in almost without warning.

We’ve been negative in the last half here and, while these complaints need bringing up, there’s still fun to be had with The Callisto Protocol. When we get powered up, the room to room fights can have moments of exhilarating triumph as we conquer enemies one after the other, all the while using GRP, guns, and dodges to scrape by unharmed. We also really appreciated the use of the Dead Space-like diegetic HUD; Jacob has his health on the back of his neck, while menus and upgrade screens are presented as though they exist within the world rather than pause menus.

There are also loads of secret and off the main track paths to explore to find more story and items, some of which are well hidden (and some we definitely missed thinking back knowing what we know now). There is no map or even waypoint system so it can be a bit potluck as to whether we’re going the right way or towards a side area, but we had fun exploring Black Iron and the other locales with The Callisto Protocol.

We beat the game in around 10 hours and for us, this is the perfect length for a title such as this. There are one or two sections we’d cut down if anything (an extended stealth area should have been half as long thanks to repeating the same tricks and areas) but any longer and it may have lost even more good will from us.

Conclusion

Thinking back on the game as a whole, though there’s obviously that Dead Space DNA running through it – from the over the shoulder camera, the stomping on corpses for items, the diegetic UI and more – this feels like the successor we probably should have received instead of Dead Space 3. The action is here but it still managed to keep the survival horror flavour and tone intact. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid outing for Striking Distance and one we hope they can build on in the future.