One cannot avoid Dead Space when talking about The Callisto Protocol. After the end of the Dead Space series in 2012, many games have tried to restore its cold, lonely American space horror atmosphere. And among them, The Callisto Protocol released on December 2nd is closest to reaching that goal, so far, and was highly anticipated.
This spiritual successor created by former Dead Space producer Glen Schofield perfectly presents a giant industrial complex in space, crowded with horrible creatures infected by alien viruses. While limbs, organs and blood are sprinkled and painted all over Black Iron Prison with the help of its “AAAA” cutting-edge graphical quality.
Opposite to the unmatched gore and atmosphere shaping is the equally prominent design flaws of The Callisto Protocol. The game suffers from poor PC performance, a bland story with a lack of depth in the combat system and level design. These failings are destined to make this blood-red space thriller framed as a bold and fresh attempt, but not a good game that stands on its own.
The game begins when Jacob is accidentally imprisoned in Callisto's highest security prison, Black Iron, after the transport ship he was driving crashed. A mass riot ensues, and an unknown and deadly virus transforms the inmates into terrifyingly vicious beasts. You will play as Jacob to fight monsters in the cold and dark facilities of the prison, to kill your way out of Black Iron Prison.
The development team, Striking Distance Studios (SDS), has done an impeccable job of creating the game's terrifying atmosphere, and SDS has almost perfectly orchestrated all the scare elements needed for a successful sci-fi horror game: loud alarm bells, mechanical and electronic sounds, the wailing of survivors and the flames of exploding facilities; or the silence of a dark laboratory, the occasional slimy grunts of monsters, and the constant hovering of the mysterious whispering in your ear.
In The Callisto Protocol, you will go from a frightening prison break scene dominated by loud sounds and bright explosions into a darkened laboratory filled with the sound of dripping blood and electrical sparks, making you pray that someone will turn the lights on. This huge contrast is so powerful that it amplifies one's insecurities to the highest levels and keeps them there.
After a couple of hours, when players are almost desensitized to such an atmosphere, the game cleverly switches from industrial facilities to a more natural scene of greenhouses on the surface of the moon. Then a blizzard will cut your visibility down until you can’t tell if the shapes in front of you are alive or dead, friend or enemy.
The Callisto protocol claimed to be a AAAA game during the promo, and the actual graphical performance is worthy of the title. Digital Foundry also praised it as "The best evolution of the Unreal 4 Engine".
The lighting and particle systems also make the game thrilling. The fog that can not be penetrated by light, the dim mine lights half blocked by the parasitic spores, the body with only half a jaw illuminated by an emergency light’s red strobing...
You are constantly worrying whether there will be a horrible zombie with the reputation of "the highest graphical quality ever" hiding somewhere, preparing to get close to you with its photo-realistic, car accident scene face.
In contrast to the extreme graphics, the game's monster design is a little conservative. Most of the monsters in the game don’t go beyond a humanoid form, and most of their attacks are just punches.
The game's combat system is quite refreshing, at first, with a heavy emphasis on melee attacks and dodging. Players can dodge an enemy’s attack and follow up with their melee weapon, then use firearms to stagger the enemy and continue the attack. But after a few hours, this combat system seems a bit repetitive. Especially when other fighting techniques are not very effective on the monsters, railroading players into only using this style of combat for the entire game.
The game also has a gravity rig called the GRP that grabs monsters and objects and throws them, and it's hard not to think of a similar mechanic in Dead Space. But in The Callisto Protocol, what the GRP mostly does is grab monsters and throw them into the preposterous number of spike walls littering the game. The spike walls show up with such a frequency that sometimes it feels like they are covering over SDS’s inability to add greater diversity of environment and design.
What's more, the terrible optimization brought by the excellent graphical quality can not be overlooked. The game received a “Mostly Negative” review rank on Steam on the first day of its release due to the unacceptable PC performance.
Even with Sony's technical support, the PS5 version, which is said to be the most stable one with 60 FPS in performance mode, will still drop to low FPS in some large scenes. Whenever I saw multiple infected monsters run towards me, my first reaction was not panic but "FK! Here we go again.”
However, SDS has released an update for the optimization problem, and Steam's reviews have bumped up to “Mixed", and hopefully, the problem will be rectified further.
For those who love sci-fi horror games, The Callisto Protocol is a wonderful, gore-filled sci-fi horror game. The tense ten-hour story and the excellent graphics are definitely worth the price. However, compared to the golden age old-timers like Dead Space, there is still something missing.