Almost a decade and a half ago, Visceral Games released Dead Space, a now cult-classic survival horror game inspired by the likes of extraterrestrial and the thing. If you’ve ever longed for a return to his blend of sci-fi and horror, or if you want a nearly identical experience to Schofield’s first survival horror hit, you’re in luck. Schofield’s latest The Callisto Protocol is incredibly close to Dead Space, for better or for worse. Unfortunately much too familiar. There are glimmers of grandeur, namely in its opening hours, but what unfolds afterward is a tedious and unsurprising eight hours that feels like a relic of the past.
The Callisto Protocol is primarily set in and around Black Iron Prison on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. After a crash landing, correctional officers lock up protagonists Jacob Lee and Dani Nakamura in Black Iron Prison. Something goes wrong; Jacob escapes his cell and shortly thereafter encounters his first biophage, a highly mutated monstrosity that’s more fleshy, pustating blood than a human.
The game presents its unique close combat system here and is one of the highlights. Dodging by dragging the stick left and right is engaging, as are the heavy and slow swings of Jacob’s melee attack. Each hit packs a ton of impact, and with proper timing and precise evasive maneuvers, I’ve satisfactorily defeated enemies with just this electrified prison staff. Weapons are thrown into the mix later, but they’re not as satisfying as the baton, nor do they meaningfully stand out from each other. It felt like a necessity to upgrade my baton to keep it useful to the end, although ammo is plentiful if you want to go into blazing gun encounters. The telekinesis-like pull-and-throw GRP system is useful and fun, but it has disappointingly little to do with it other than throwing enemies into the same three types of Insta-Death Machines, off a ledge or you away.
You will be asked to leave by characters speaking over the radio here and thereand as soon as you show up, something goes wrong, and now you have to meet her at This place. After a few hours, I was predicting most of the story beats in advance, all the while being fed breadcrumbs from a larger narrative. Sure, things happened, but I rarely saw a glimpse of the game’s overarching story until the last hour, and at that point it felt like a rushed information overload. While Dani’s story, which weaves in and out with Jacobs throughout the game’s duration, comes to a satisfying conclusion, Jacobs doesn’t. It ends with a scene that feels inorganically enticing and is destined to ensure I buy the upcoming story DLC.
The final boss before this disappointing climax is a grueling and repetitive battle that feels like a bygone era; the one that every game had to include, even if it turned out to be unnecessary. This wasn’t the only disappointing boss. All left me with a feeling of emptiness and anger at the lack of variety. You’ll fight the same enemy type multiple times throughout the game as a boss, just in different arenas. Most bosses can kill you in one hit, taking the stress out of survival horror that’s deserved. I wasn’t desperate for ammo or a health pack to survive on the skin of my teeth; I just jogged away to make sure his hits didn’t land near me.
Adding to my frustration is a bad checkpoint system. You must replay the entire fight if you die by insta-kill, even at the end of a boss fight. If you have to kill a few enemies before this fight, you’ll have to do that again as well. The same goes for ammo, audio logs, and other resources too, even if you save exactly where you want to pick up after this type of post-death prep. Poor checkpointing is also present in standard enemy encounters, which quickly became stale.
Listening to audio logs, which add little touches of needed flavor to the area you’re playing through, requires you to remain in the log menu and you can’t move or browse the surroundings while listening. The death animations are exciting and gruesome, but lack variety. They’re flawed too, and some death scenes are drastically more interesting to watch than others. A biophage that pulls Jacob’s eyes out of their sockets, for example, is great. But watching an enemy knock Jacob to the ground in an unintentionally hilarious and anticlimactic ragdoll-esque manner falls flat.
Weapon animations that play when you switch weapons look great at first, but you’ll have to agonize to use a new weapon. If you aim or click reload too early during the animation, the sequence will end and the weapon you were using before attempting this change will return. This is frustrating during tense combat encounters where I’m flipping through my handful of weapons to find the right one. A unique rapid-fire mechanic that automatically locks on an enemy’s weak spot at the end of a melee combo is a nice addition to combat systems, but if your equipped weapon runs out of ammo or needs to be reloaded and you don’t realize it, you’re just hitting fire with it nothing happens and you remain open to damage. The Callisto Protocol is dying by a thousand cuts like this.
Aside from these various issues, the Callisto Protocol still does much of what Dead Space did, for better or for worse. And there are funny moments too, even if they are light in contrast to real horror. I agree that the Callisto Protocol is a different version of its spiritual predecessor, but it struggles to nail down even the basics. As a result, I’m overwhelmed, annoyed, and disappointed. If you wanted more of that second crack in creating a new survival-horror-style sci-fi IP, or something distinctly different that acknowledges how far gaming has come since 2008, The Callisto Protocol isn’t your answer.
