When a beloved new IP is run into the ground and compromised by EA, that tried to squeeze Call Of Duty money out of a horror franchise and even had microtransactions inserted in the last mainline title…. seeing the publisher basically give up and do nothing with it for years is frustrating, even more so when the finale was followed up by a DLC retconning the ending.
And the inevitable homicide by EA of Visceral Games, after the routine danse macabre of shuffling them into developing completely different games of a completely different genre, lamenting how the star shaped peg doesn’t fit into the durian shaped hole, was the cherry on the corpse sundae.
So of course this leaves a specific hole in the market for “spiritual sequels” to fill, and mind you, this was announced before EA announced their own remake of the first Dead Space.
And on paper, The Callisto Protocol sounded exactly what fans of the series like me wanted, a “fuck you” to the vampiric publisher that wasn’t serving an audience starved for that action-horror sci fi dish, done outside of their control, with even some of the original creators of the series involved.
This is the kind of underdog story that we wanna see, as apparently everyone hates EA, and only EA for some stupid reasons, but alas this is not quite what actually happened.
For clarity, i did not play the PS5/PC Dead Space remake, i simply cannot at the moment, so i will be comparing the game to the original Dead Space trilogy, which i played on X-Box 360.
i’ll say they did put a lot of money in it, this isn’t the budget alternative, this is a big budget looking production that clearly had a lot of money invested in it.
The plot sees a cargo ship transporting something that a terrorist group (hilarious called The Extreme) wants, attacking the ship, and forcing the pilot to crashland on Callisto, the prison moon, resulting in the co-pilot/partner dying, the prison staff turning both the terrorist leader and you into the huge prison complex on Callisto. There you get internated, and wake up to complete chaos, with fires, broken guard robots, destruction and monstrous humanoids running around, which are implicated to be somewhat fault of the warden, he already sounded crazy when introduced, so you can already guess in the first chapter he’s the one turning people into monsters, regardless if you don’t know why yet.
Yes, you can see the “similar but not identical” vibes to replicate the Dead Space storyline with the Mark cult and shit, though sure as hell they didn’t try to replicate any of the good parts of that game story, or any atmosphere.
Heck, the plot is straightforward to a fault, as that’s literally what i explained before, most of the audiologs you find around add nothing of substance or depth, the plot or characters never move from being underdeveloped, lacking, vague and utterly generic, there’s no real worldbuilding or characterization to be found behind the surface, and it’s a generic ass looking surface.
The main characters are all kinda of unlikeable too, the standout being the Black Iron (yes the prison complex is called that, i’m not joking) inmate that somehow gets some decent characterization, apart from him you won’t give an absolute shit about what happens to your player character, Jacob, or anyone else pegged as the main character.
I was honestly surprised by how little of nothing is there to the story, with very little of actual cutscenes, the villain barely being a presence until the last part, the characters themselves having very little screen time too, and how few of these audiologs actually add any semblance of texture to the story or characters, since most are just random recording of scientists or soldiers reacting.
With that in mind, the creaure design it’s especially criminal because the monsters look like generic “infected monster resurrected after marinating in a septic sank for 1, 2 or 3 weeks” assett packs, like, even Oneechanbara had more memorable foes, and that was a game that just threw random ass types of undead or monsters at the players.
This is supposed to be the Necromorphs equivalent, and i’m not deliberately avoiding to compare it to Dead Space, because the game always wants to be that, to remind you of that, so transparent in its utterly incompetent aping.
Curiously (especially given what i just said), the developer felt the need to distinct itself from its big inspiration, so instead of functioning like a third person shooter, The Callisto Protocol approach to handling combat is melee based.
I can respect trying, i would wonder though if the developers didn’t learn shit from Neverdead (or the PS2 era trend of trying to have melee combat with analog stick controls only, see Rise Of Honour, Death By Degrees, and Grabbed By The Ghoulies), but then it implies they played that pile o’ shit. Regardless, they did realize it’s not a good idea, so they didn’t do that, but the basis of the combat do rely on you using the left analog stick to also dodge and block by holding it in the opposite direction of where the blow is coming, or towards the player if you wanna block it, then using one of the shoulder buttons to land a melee blow.
It may be ok for the first half hour, but after that you wonder how the fuck are they gonna escalate things, as just adding another enemy to the equation fucks it up.. they don’t, this system is made for one on one fights, but the enemies aren’t gonna wait their turn off screen to fight his friends one at the time. They are not bound by such limitations, which include taking many cheap shots from off-camera enemies you can’t see, and the fact you still use the left analog stick to move.
Also, the side effect of mindlessly aping DS entire look and style cues has unintentional flaws, like the health bar placed on your neck, again, because DS had the health integrated in the suit design by displaying it on the spine. Problem is, in DS you could always see it clearly because it was a shooter, here at times it’s hard to gauge on the fly how much health you have left, since by fighting you move around a lot, hence, accidentally obscuring the health indicator.
Not a deal breaker itself, but not ideal when the main dish is a combat system that is swift to punish errors and requires instant reactions, the system itesel it’s not good to begin with, but it’s made utter trash because this is not Punch Out, despite playing exactly like a boxing game of yore, just fitted badly in a third person horror game, one with such a bad camera that can barely handle it even during the 1 vs 1 fights the combat system is designed to.
It’s so awkward that they had to explain in the tutorial tips that you don’t actually need to dodge the first blow of an enemy combo by holding the stick in the opposite direction of the attack… because it’s true, the first one is for free, just a band aid clearly slapped on when they realized how unwieldy this mess of a combat system was, and you can unlock a couple of extra abilities, but they’re also hastily applied patches that don’t add much depth to a system that honestly feels half-baked, like if they wanted to have a a methodical approach to combat, but gave up almost immediatly, and decided – fuck it, who cares – and gave you firearms.
even with the sweep, a strong slow attack and longer combo for the base attacks, the strategy devolves in mashing the normal attack pre-emptively on the base enemies, at least a bit, you’re too slow anyway to do this and not take damage anyway, abusing the guns and telekinesis.
Always a good sign in a horror game when you don’t wanna engage enemies because you feel scared or in danger of them, but because they’re annoyances; makes sense, the combat is a boring annoyance that get old very fast too, the supposed monsters might as well too be more annoying than theathening to fight, because nothing here is scary, btw, so bargain basement is the “horror” on display, embarassing for something that has people that actually worked on Dead Space on it.
especially since – on top of the combat just not being precise at its core- the enemies barely telegraph their combo attacks, and do not telegraph at all the grabs that can often lead to near or istant death, since the enemies just do way too much damage, are usually faster than you in attacking and – again – aren’t bound to “a knight’s honorable bout” like you.
Eventually the enemies start mutating, which is shown by tentacles sprouting from their torso, and if you don’t stop them they will mutate and become stronger and faster…. which doesn’t matter much because it just means you gotta be quicker at dispatching or downing a foe and then stomping on it to finish him proper, honestly it barely matters if you get used to the combat because the assist for gun usage after a combo aims at their torso anyway for a critical or nearly critical hit.
This is one of the abilities that does help in dealing with foes… but this too can fail because the enemy isn’t frozen in time during this lapse, so the shot will still be aimed at where the weak spot was initially, not where it actually is when it needed/supposed to, so it just adds a new layer of potential frustration and irritation.
That said, it does replicate most elements from Dead Space to a tee, to the dedicated stomp button to finish off and/or get items from the dead foes, heck, after a while you get a suit that’s basically a bootleg hands me down of Isaac Clarke’s., and halfway through the game basically becomes even more DS 3, since you go out on Callisto’s surface, which is snowy.
There’s also terminals to buy upgrades, medkits and weapons, which im surprised isn’t busted or catalyst to some balance issues, like, there is the expected inventory management and having to evaluate selling useful supplies for credits that are useful but never abudant… surprised they didn’t fuck up the scarcity of ammo and items in a survival horror game, given everything else.
The DS aping becomes straight up insulting because it does them a lot worse, even the telekinesis, useful as it is it never used beyond throwing enemies into spike-laden walls, fan blades or (more rarely) pits, and destroying vents lids, as this game does indeed loves to dedicate a significant amount of time to crawling through vents, passing through narrow slits in the terrain
There is the fuse swapping to power up doors or replace faulty ones, but there’s no real attempt at any puzzle of sort, even enviromental ones.
The “crawl through small spaces” sequences are pretty typical AAA fluff i wouldn’t mind too much, even if they feel old fashioned by 2022, if the game was actually fun to play when it isn’t sheparding you into these non-gameplay transitionary sequences.
Even in the few cases where you’re given some free roam to explore, (besides the random exploration being at odds with it being a survival horror) it’s more annoying since navigation is often confusing, there’s no map, nor an objective market to remember where you were supposed to go, and the level design is disorientating, often there’s no real telling which way will make you progress or will lead to an optional room with enemies and maybe some items….. to even out what ammo and health you lost by tackling these optional foes to begin with.
And MAYBE for some audiologs that either don’t contribute shit to the lore or characters, or have little interesting to add when they – rarely – do.
To be fair, the melee combat at its core can be somewhat fun, with his meaty feeling, there’s a base satisfaction in bashing in skull using a sci-fi electric baton, but the combat is so awkawrd and built on shaky ground it’s hard to enjoy it, especially when it used for situation it’s not really made for, lacking balance and finesse, having to eventually give you guns that aren’t made to be the main method of offense…but basically become big ass crutches since they gave up trying to have some depth to the melee combat.
Horror is cheap as shit, with cheap jumpscares laden QTE events, this one is the first and most favourite trick and you’ll be hating it by the first hour, so badly it immediatly overuses this crap, and keeps abusing to oblivion all the way through the 10 hours campaign.
It’s a game that loves cheap shots, like random leeches from opening boxes that require even more button mashing QTEs to remove before they drain even more random chunks of health, a tactic that the game abuses to a laughable degree and often because it knows it’s the only way it can create the desperate illusion of challenge, since you will easily find a way to master and/or abuse the combat system and IA, as there’s nothing to those in terms of depth or complexity.
A nasty bully, so it revels on its cheap tricks and making you feel helpless, in this case just deciding its time to remove some of your health with leeches hidden in chests, bursting from nowhere, sometimes literally unseen AND impredictable longneck monsters chomping on you from a boil, or inevitable QTE mashes were an enemy just gets to remove some health from you, even if you do them correctly the game will still decide it IS dick flattening time.
Speaking of which, the level design loves cheap shots too, like the habitat area with a robot sentinel patrolling around with “bootleg Hunters from DS 2” springtrap your ass from the trees…. pure, unadultered manure.
and by the mid-way point the frail, shitty system completely breaks, as you face even more large groups of enemies at once, and the game introduces the “Two Heads”, which decides to change the rules, requiring guns (also for his boss battle it doesn’t matter the direction you’re holding the stick, as long as you do the dodge always works).. but also to melee him at specific points, despite doing so in any other occasion results in the monster one-shotting your ass.
The cherry on top is that this is the first boss fight, it happens at the end of the 6th chapter in a 8 chapters game, and this is of course compounded by how there’s actually just two bosses, the Two Heads you’ll have to fight again as a mini-boss two more times, and the sub-villain, which also doubles as the final boss with an extra form, both forms punishing melee (the latter is basically just shooting because the damage you do with melee is negligable at best), while having the longest combos to dodge by weaving left and right properly.
A final battle that almost feel like its not even from the same game you’ve started, but it is.
you know what does it remind me of? Of Velvet Assassin, a stealth game that for the finale had you just going guns blazing and trying to fend off a literal infinite horde of enemies, until you’re cut off by the game itself. And when i’m reminded of Velvet Assassin, that already is a red flag.
curiously, there is a stealth system… as in, you can crouch, crouchwalk, and do a silent kill on unaware monstrosities you can sneak behind. It’s so barely used that the game has to dedicate an entire level after the mid-part, like they forgot they half-baked a stealth system because “AAA games have them” and have to get some use out of it, wouldn’t be surprised, the patrol robots meant for these sneaking sessions are also barely used after their introductory section.
Though the stealth isn’t the worst i’ve seen, even if pretty typical mandatory AAA element as it looks like, inserted in “because”, it makes more sense in a survival horror game than something like that The Order 1846, which i’m remainded of because often this feel more like a glorified tech demo for a Dead Space wanna be/spiritual sequel, thanks to the emphasis on production values, on looks over fun or balance, or not having the two souls of the game constantly fighting each other.
Though this long stealth section is indicative as a whole of when the team gave up, just gave up, as they didn’t even bother to restrict usage of guns, as for many sub-sections you can just gun the two-three blind monsters, especially since by that point doing most stealth kill will have you with kinda abundant ammo, and by the final boss, you won’t even use the baton, because the game gave up and also hurriedly gives you another gun after unlocking another one not so long before,
because fuck it, we’re almost done, just give him the new gun already.
Speaking of which, the arsenal is pitiful too, it’s like 5 guns, and two might as well not exist because they overlap and make the previous ones feel pointless in retrospect, like, they couldn’t even do this right, but again, it’s clear they hurriedly rushed to make the final chapters more like Dead Space, after they gave up with the admittley rubbish melee centric combat… but it still so creatively aboherrent, as ironically the game had gonne full circle trying to differentiate itself despite being an obvious DS clone…. to just being bootleg Dead Space, we’re that now, just shittier in every way.
the overload of weapons and ammo you can find and/or loot in the later chapters also indicates to me (might be a hint, at best) the game was most likely meant to be bigger, but with all the help and resources they had, with the time they had… i’m not too symphatetic, because it shows the team and vision lacked any dignity of their own, that they believed none of it, and maybe should have stayed a couple more years in the oven… but then again, this project was most likely so mismanaged and blinkard it wouldn’t have changed much if anything.
especially considering this came out 15 years after the first DS, with that in mind, the backing of PUBG publisher Krafton, and the co-creator of DS involved…. there’s no excuse for thing turning out this shit, and desperate in its aping of its inspiration.
Then there’s the tomfuckery of the studio selling… death animations (again, i repeat, death animations for the player character) behind paid DLC, maybe even the entire Season Pass, which is even more galling since they clearly put all the effort in those (annoying as they become to see when confronting one of the many difficulty spikes) the kills are gruesome stuff.
the DLC content otherwise amounts to some skins, a new story expansion, and some extra modes that… well, there’s Riot mode, which is an actual mode, as in a rogue-like ish survival gauntlet, Contagion is not a mode, it’s just the hyper duper Dante Must Die difficulty, not a mode, same goes for the dismemberment difficulty, where you can dismember enemies with one hit.
The latter one especially galling to sell as paid DLC in a game that wants so bad to ape Dead Space and constantly remind you it’s doing just that without a doubt.
i got the season pass on sale for dirt cheap, because i also did the same for Homefront The Revolution, so really, why not at this point, but still, most of it it’s stuff that should have been in the base game, stat, but i did bother with the story DLC, Final Transmission, as it gives the proper closure to the story continuing from the cliffhanger ending of the base game.
The story DLC is a 3 hours affair that also adds a new weapon, the Kinetic Hammer, sadly you get it by the end of the DLC, but it is fun to use (and OP as hell) and it’s made to counter the new enemy type, cyborgs made with the infected “non-necromorphs” fused to a robot sentinels, which are even worse than the regular robo sentinels.
That aside, the DLC does have some items made for use as projectiles via the telekinesis abilities (like in DS, yes, even more) and some fiddly “node matching” timed puzzles/minigames to unlock doors or restart generators, alongside some brand new cheap shots/frustrating as hell sections, but yeah, mostly the same, even with some little surprises, about what you’d expect.
Though i feel it’s a little better than the base game, since it adds things like puzzles and a new melee weapon that is OP but it’s also fun, maybe that could have been used as the base if they ever actually wanted to develop a proper combat system with melee in mind for a survival horror
If it does actually give closure… kinda, for the overall story it just adds little of substance, but it does give Jacob as a character a more conclusive finale.. in hindsight for the better, since a sequel is not happening, Krafton declared, but you can skip it as it doesn’t really change or gives a new prospective to the finale and the implications.
Overall, The Callisto Protocol it’s a sad, misguided attempt at aping Dead Space that never comes anywhere closer in terms of quality, far from it.
I could gloss over the absolute generic nothing that’s the plot and the obvious aping of DS in everything…. if this was a decent enough appromixation of DS in term of gameplay or quality, but that would require being much of a narrative or a plot to comment on.
It is not, it’s not even fun, just mostly miserable and frustrating to play through, i was genuinely moved by spite to progress more than anything else, i finished this because i’m bound by own code on the matter, and some appetite for punishment, because that’s how it feel to play.
A survival horror game, even if action heavy, obviously shouldn’t make players feel “safe”, yes, but The Callisto Protocol is a shitty little bastard that it’s deliberately hostile toward the player and tries to pass off this sentiment as “difficulty” or “challenge”, despite very little of it actually being that, to disguise cheap shots as a naturally hostile game enviroment, when the game itself it’s hostile to its own players way beyond the need to offer a feeling of challenge and dread since its’ a survival horror game,
Constant punishment, often for no real reason, just because the game feels like it.
And the fact some of the staff did work on the original DS series just condemns it further below the abyss… what would have been still a subpar and still buggy (patches apparently did fix some of the more glaring bugs and some issues with the combat inputs, there were a lot of shit to fix to what i’ve have been able to surmise, so on launch it must have been even worse) imitation, and it looking good ironically makes it worse, because it’s a facade to obfuscate the shitty videogame it is.
Even if you went it expecting to at least scratch that itch for DS… you’ll wish you fired up the original trilogy and played those again instead.
Heck, even Lost Planet 3 was better than this.
Wise Cafe (International) 