3/5 ★ – Endless_backlog's review of The Callisto Protocol.

32hrs After waiting eagerly for months to buy this game after its release I decided to buy it on disk.. upon which I was left so frustrated at how the bugs in this version made the game unplayable. Graphics completely missing from monsters faces, the game crashing and closing itself every 10 minutes.. but after downloading some update it seemed to rectify itself. My big take away from Callisto was that I expected a blend of horror and problem solving to escape Black Iron prison, and instead I was left with a game that was very linear and initially so difficult to progress, and why does it take soo long to reload after dying?? The dodge mechanic is a major part of fighting, and once you learn that the route to success is to dodge 3 times, strike, and one shot kill monsters as the tentacles appear, the game becomes much easier to navigate. FYI if you stomp defeated enemies you can pick up ammo/health, something I didn’t pick up on until the final hour of gameplay. The inventory could have been far better utilised. I was hoarding CPU printers/decoders etc thinking they would have a purpose that would help me advance.. only to discover their only purpose was for resell. A huge opportunity for additional content missed I feel. I really liked the monsters and the gory “fatality scenes” but they sold themselves short with the main boss battles, using the same one on several occasions felt very cut and paste. Felt the ending was getting interesting and just wasn’t explored enough. That Final Cut scene should have been the gateway for one big fun final mission. Overall, a fun idea that was never fully developed.