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

The Callisto Protocol is the recent game from Glenn Scofield, who gave us the amazing Dead Space game. While Callisto aims to be a spiritual successor of sorts to Dead Space, it instead succeeds at being the Target off brand version. Let’s get the good out of the way: this is probably the best looking game I have seen on PS5 yet. From the lighting to the design of Black Iron Prison and the tech, it’s all so fascinating to look at. The sound design is solid as well; something that made Dead Space such a timeless classic. The team knocked it out of the park here. I really liked Josh Duhamel as the main character. It was interesting seeing him be more serious because I remember him from Life As We Know It. But apart from him, the rest of the cast are pretty forgettable. Which leads to the rest of the game. Honestly, I think this game’s biggest problem is the same as Gotham Knights: the movement just doesn’t feel right. It’s far too sluggish to the point that healing or swapping weapons during a fight (especially boss fights) is not even worth attempting. Jacob simply needs to move faster but he moves like he’s melting into a pile of goo. I did find the stealth sections to be fun but the enemy AI is so subpar that it’s easy to just get close to the blind enemies (which are literally Clickers from The Last of Us), circle around them, and stealth take them down. Had the movement and animations been faster, it would have gone a long way in making the game more enjoyable to play. As an aside, I don’t get why they hyped these death animations so much. You typically avoid dying in these games and I found the animations to be far too excessive and violent for my taste, especially if the final boss got a hold you. Which, whoever designed that final boss ought to be removed from designing those fights. Simply dreadful. And don’t even get me started on the abysmal checkpoint system. All in all, I like The Callisto Protocol to a degree: it’s visually stunning and the sound design is top notch. But it’s playing it that makes this game seem like it’d be a better B-movie than it would a video game. I appreciated the influences from The Thing and Alien but it’s not enough to make me recommend this, especially at $70.