The Callisto Protocol Review

"Dead Moon, Lifeless Game"

Campaign

December 9, 2022 at 9:50pm
By Jason Stettner

It’s three hundred years in the future, an outbreak has happened and you’re carrying precious cargo. Taking on the role of Jacob Lee (Josh Duhamel) you’re flying this craft when suddenly everything goes horribly wrong and you eventually find yourself in a prison. This place is called Black Iron Prison and it’s basically the worst of locations being found on Jupiter’s moon.

Just as things seemingly can’t get worse, an outbreak happens and everyone is dying. You’ll then go about discovering this mystery, finding the secretive elements to be the most exciting aspect and teased only for something more down the road.

There’s literally a sort of cut point where DLC will continue this particular tale down the road, so it doesn’t feel quite conclusive in terms of being a standalone story if you just go with the base game. The narrative itself is fairly straight forward and ultimately rather empty.

You don’t really get a sense for these core characters, and with there being so few it’s hard to imagine why we didn’t get more of a focal point on these individuals. There are audio logs that expand the universe but you have to stand there to listen to them.

That’s a lot of the game, quite disjointed and very janky. It’s a lot of crawling through vents, skimming along pipes and then walking slowly down a corridor slashing grindy enemies. Then when you die, the checkpoints are brutal requiring you to move through slow paths multiple times. It’s almost maddening quite honestly.

With that, difficulty wise there really appears to be little to no difference between normal or easy. The bosses take forever to kill with the same boss being re-used four times very closely together in small awkward arenas where that foe slashes through unbreakable objects. It largely comes across as cheap as opposed to challenging and just annoying.

For example, I spent an hour going through a hallway. This is largely due to the awkward dodging/combative aspects and the randomly generating loot. I needed bullets, the game just seemed to refuse to deliver those at that point. It’s these frustrations and ever more that amount against this one. Even at its core, past the annoyances it’s a rather bland experience. It looks and feels like Dead Space, but doesn’t emulate that sort of feeling at all.

There’s no scares, no tension in any situations and it lacks that grim aspect. It really feels like some sort of light imitator of a much better franchise. It’s very linear in design, tight so that you don’t have the ability to handle the grindy combat well and it feels too light. There’s no gravity to really trying to look to the side of find something. You get punished if there are areas to go off on, as they don’t really provide much for you.

Gameplay

Visually I was really impressed with The Callisto Protocol. It definitely looks beautiful, foreboding and well set for a horror scenario. It just doesn’t use these environments or visuals effectively. You get some real next gen, or well current gen shine but with no substance underneath. You get gorgeous well rendered individuals with well setup cutscenes and yet there’s no real care for these characters outside maybe just the one you play.

An individual that is usually just empty faced the whole time, barely surprised to see literal monsters running about. It would have been nice to get a deeper understanding of his perspective, and less about how he feels towards the other characters that we don’t really learn a whole lot about or get attached to at all. It’s weirdly disjointed from a narrative perspective. That aside, it plays fairly simply.

You slumber down corridors smacking enemies a good dozen times. They take forever to eliminate and it’s exhausting. There’s a dodge mechanic and assists if needed, but I never really felt like the dodge/attack elements felt right to me. It also got old real fast. I was about tired out from this one a couple hours in but grinded through the rest of this and it was just punishing. I also felt like I lacked ammo and health, with either becoming cumbersome to actually deploy in combat.

Sure, you can stomp bodies and open containers but with the random systems I never really got anything. Same with special loot for upgrading, rarely came across enough coins or items to sell to 3D print better stuff. Health requires you to very slowly stop and squeeze a green liquid into your neck, it’s slow. Weapon changing or reloaded sometimes just didn’t work causing me to die.

With checkpoints being bad I’d often have to redo 3D printer usages which took awhile since you need to watch the item print. Talking about repetitive elements this game seemed very basic in what you do, and in the death sequences which while creative kept repeating a ton in some sequences. When it comes to the gameplay experience I was on Xbox Series X where there were two modes.

The first was performance which offered a dynamic 4k resolution at 60fps. The second was a quality mode with a dynamic 4k at 30fps. Quality mode also offered ray traced shadow improvements and just today as of writing was updated with ray traced reflections which I did not get to experience. The performance mode was my primary option, I noticed both exhibited drops though performance had many early on.

In cutscenes and regular gameplay, particularly during cutscenes where it felt halved at times. It wasn’t too bad during traditional gameplay, but still was noticeable. I do feel that VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) would help with this, I was livestreaming the game so that wasn’t in effect for me. There’s also HDR support.

The Conclusion

The Callisto Protocol had some performance issues, but at its core just wasn’t a great game lacking exciting moments or well anything even remotely scary. I was never entertained while playing this game; finding it boring, cumbersome and honestly rather traumatic but not in a terrified sense which is a shame.

Sure, it’s got some hyper violence with lots of gore down pact. It just never really felt well balanced or well setup. I lacked basic resources to tackle scenarios, weapon damages felt entirely random and it was just a bland time. Sometimes you’d mildly inconvenience enemies with numerous bullets whereas other times picking up an enemy and throwing them slightly was all you needed.

Sure, it has that next gen/current gen shine applied to it but there was no really exciting substance behind the curtain. The boss fights felt lazy, random and re-used. The enemies looked cool but lacked excitement to them in combat. It was just a horrible time and one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Not necessarily just from a technical standpoint, but one where I just straight up didn’t enjoy any of it. It’s a shame as I went in with minimal expectations of something resembling Dead Space but ultimately left feeling like I went through some elongated trauma and punishment for trying to enjoy a game.

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The Callisto Protocol Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by ID@Xbox

Rating Overall: 3.5