2/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of The Callisto Protocol.

The Callisto Protocol! Also known as the closest thing we'll probably ever get to a Dead Space 4 was something I had been anticipating for a few years now. A lot of the original developers on Dead Space, working on a new game that looks extremely similar to Dead Space, with beautiful looking art direction and animations, how could this not be great? Well this game has been out for a week now, and you've most likely seen the negative reception towards it. To say I'm disappointed by this game is an understatement, I held on hope that maybe this game wasn't as disappointing as everyone else was saying, but lo and behold I unfortunately had my heart broken by the end, yet that's not to say it's terrible either. For starters, the art direction and animations are fantastic. If I can give high praise to anything it would be how jaw-droppingly gorgeous this game is. Every environment is packed with an immense level of visual detail that makes the entire experience a marvel to look at, and honestly boosted my enjoyment of the game by quite a bit. Even the character models look near photorealistic at points, I don't think I've seen a lot of studios able to pull off this high level of facial detail and complexity. Even with lip syncing and movement, everything just looks top-notch, which causes a weird contrast with how middling this game feels while playing it. The characters and overall plot this game has is serviceable for the most part. I was disappointed by how cut and dry the entire story was presented through constant cutscenes and the interchanging of dialogue. This story could have benefitted from a lot more visual story telling, instead of the constant exposition dumps you receive in game. The characters lack a lot of much needed development that I feel would have drastically improved the experience if given to the audience earlier, especially with the main character. Yet again, this wasn't really a negative, but it was another thing to add to the list of disappoints, especially compared to Dead Space. The Callisto Protocol wants to be Dead Space more than anything. It's clear influences are written on every wall throughout every level, almost unapologetically. Enemies mutating from humans, the heads up display being tied to your character, the sci-fi space setting, this game wants nothing more but to convince you that you're playing Dead Space. So whenever I hear people online saying "it's not fair to compare the games", it is completely valid to do so. Whenever this game stops throwing constant dialogue, cutscenes and jumpscares at your face, and you're given an objective and the ability to explore, all be it limitedly, it feels like Dead Space, but only from a gameplay standpoint. The Callisto Protocol seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of survival horror, horror in general and what made the original game it's based off of, and it's sequel, so great. The original Dead Space was entirely built upon a terrifying atmosphere and near perfect level design. You're instantly thrown into this nightmarish scenario with limited resources at your disposal as you navigate this infected space craft. A lot of the game is built off of tension alone, rather than in your face jump scares. The level design has a metroidvania flow to it, where you travel through previous areas with new equipment at your disposal to open up branching passageways. To sum it up, Dead Space is great based off tension derived from you being underpowered against terrifying enemies. On the contrary, Dead Space 2 is a lot more action oriented and loses that original games small scale tension with how over the top it ends up feeling, similar to how Alien turned into an action movie in Aliens. Much like Dead Space 2, The Callisto Protocol is heavily action based, but instead this time it's pretending it isn't and basing it's levels as if they were strictly horror orientated. Callisto's level design is painfully simplistic. It is no more complex than going from point A to point B, there is no exploring, there is no backtracking, every room has a distinct start and end point that you never return to. Nearly every room in this game I found to be incredibly restrictive, with little to no room if enemies were to attack. The biggest difference between The Callisto Protocol and Dead Space is Callisto's focus on melee combat, which sounds fun on paper and is occasionally fun when working properly. But this combat system, mixed with the close quarters level design feels like it was not designed around each other. Whenever more than 2 enemies are thrown into the mix, the entire melee combat system collapses in on itself. Typically in games that involve melee combat, there is usually some sort of dodging mechanic that you can rely on to avoid enemy attacks. In this game, the only way a dodge is triggered is if you hit your side-to-side movement buttons while an enemy is attacking you. You aren't able to preemptively dodge an attack and you also aren't able to lock onto specific enemies. You're only able to do these basic functions while an enemy is attacking you. This is fine when there's one or two enemies around, but when 5-6 are thrown into the mix at once, your camera is constantly being tossed around between enemies you weren't originally focusing on. It is incredibly frustrating to attack an enemy only for you to dodge another enemies attack and not be able to lock back onto the original enemy you were fighting, only for that original enemy to end up killing you because you're being surrounded by enemies you were originally focused away from. There is little enemy variety in this game, which adds to how repetitive and annoying the combat encounters become, especially later in the game. In Dead Space, nearly every enemy had some sort of gimmick as a way to kill them easier, usually involving dismemberment or a certain weapon. You'd be actively incentivized to use certain weapons against certain enemies, this added a unique skill gap that rewarded players by going about combat scenarios in a smarter way. Callisto does not have that, every single enemy in this game feels like a bullet sponge. There are hardly any differences between most enemies in this game other than how fast they hit, and how much ammo or damage it takes to kill them. As a result, every enemy in this game feels like a bullet sponge and are not fun to go up against. Not only are they annoying to fight, but when you die in this game, you're forced to watch some of the longest unskippable death animations in video game history. I know they're trying to show off how crazy good their motion capture work is, but you die a lot in this game, or at least I did. Nothing irritated me more than dying and having the game rub it in my face for 20 seconds before I can try again. On top of that, there's a ton of quick time events sprinkled throughout the game. Even basic actions like opening a door or getting too close to an enemy queued this annoying button mashing sequence. Quick time events aren't game changing for me, but the way they were executed and the amount of them just felt kind of unnecessary and added to the overall repetitiveness. This is especially clear with the boss that you not only fight once, not twice, not three times BUT FOUR TIMES. THE SAME BOSS ENCOUTNER FOUR SEPERATE TIMES, which is treated as a giant bullet sponge. It'd be one thing if the game spiced it up a bit and gave this enemy some sort of unique ability or maybe something in the arena itself that could be used to defeat it. NOPE, you're just up against this same annoying enemy over and over again and you kill it in the exact same way every time. Did I mention how often you encounter this guy by a certain point the game? It felt like every twenty minutes I had to fight him again, and combined with the inconsistent dodging functionality, made me want to break my keyboard. After completing The Callisto Protocol, I can't say I didn't feel at least somewhat satisfied. It wasn't all that I had hoped it would be, but that feeling could just be amplified with how much I hyped up this game for myself, but I have a feeling it's not. This game would have benefitted greatly with a more thought out combat system, but it ends up feeling like a game that was rushed out the door too early and crushed it's reputation because of it. It's not a terrible game, but I wouldn't even say it's a good game either. It's decent at best, but hey, at least it's still better than Dead Space 3.