The Callisto Protocol
Year: 2022
Developer: Striking Distance Studios
Publisher: Krafton
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
PEGI: 18
Published: 14/02/23
Developer: Striking Distance Studios
Publisher: Krafton
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
PEGI: 18
Published: 14/02/23
I’m a big fan of horror games and the one that got me into the genre was probably 2008’s Dead Space. Dead Space was a revolutionary game at the time for combining elements of the action genre into the survival horror genre in ways that made the game more accessible and fluid to play than the likes of Resident Evil 4, but still kept players on the back foot with limited resources, powerful foes, and some amazing audio-visual design. Dead Space went on to become a big hit for EA and spawned two sequels and two spin-offs, as well as a number of animated films and comic books. The franchise would come to an abrupt end following the release of Dead Space 3 and any hopes of the franchise continuing under EA were practically nil when developer Visceral Games was handed a Star Wars license (a game that unfortunately never saw the light of day and shuttered Visceral Games). But in 2019 it was announced that former Dead Space developers were banding together under a new development house, Striking Distance Studios, and were in the midst of creating a spiritual successor to the game with PUBG: Buttlegrounds publisher Krafton. The resulting game, The Callisto Protocol, promised to be just as revolutionary for the survival horror genre on modern systems as Dead Space was in 2008, but seeing the finished product proved that was only ever a pipe dream.
When his freighter is attacked by bioterrorists, Jacob Lee crash lands on Jupiter’s icy moon Callisto. When he awakes, he finds his cargo missing, his crewmate dead, and he’s brought into custody by the United Jupiter Company (UJC) and imprisoned at their Black Iron Prison facility. Just hours later Black Iron is under siege from horrific mutations of the cellmates, aggressive and deformed by some kind of parasite. With the help of fellow inmate Elias, and leader of the bioterrorists, Dani, Jacob must fight his way out of Black Iron and escape the hell that is unfolding within.
When his freighter is attacked by bioterrorists, Jacob Lee crash lands on Jupiter’s icy moon Callisto. When he awakes, he finds his cargo missing, his crewmate dead, and he’s brought into custody by the United Jupiter Company (UJC) and imprisoned at their Black Iron Prison facility. Just hours later Black Iron is under siege from horrific mutations of the cellmates, aggressive and deformed by some kind of parasite. With the help of fellow inmate Elias, and leader of the bioterrorists, Dani, Jacob must fight his way out of Black Iron and escape the hell that is unfolding within.
If you’re familiar with Dead Space then The Callisto Protocol will feel like a trip down memory lane, both narratively and from a gameplay perspective. Everyman protagonist trapped in an outbreak of nightmarish proportions where everyone around him is being turned into monsters that want to kill him. But where The Callisto Protocol fails is that it doesn’t have the same intrigue or nuance as its 2008 predecessor, let alone any of the sequels that expanded upon the premise in meaningful and interesting ways.
Despite talking considerably more than Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke ever did, Jacob Lee is hollow and entirely one dimensional. It makes you wonder why they ever bothered to have him talk (or be mo-capped by Josh Duhamel) when he doesn’t even have as interesting a personality as Clarke did in the original Dead Space where he was completely silent. Without wanting to spoil too much of the game’s third act, Jacob is at odds with his own morality and blames himself for the outbreak in Black Iron, but this character motivation is difficult to get behind because he’s shouldering blame that isn’t his to bear and it makes him seem kind of pathetic.
Dani is a considerably more interesting character, played by Karen Fukuhara, and she delivers a decent performance considering how underwhelming the script is. Again, without spoiling too much of the late game reveals, she’s on the run for crimes she never committed and she’s considerably more resourceful and level; headed than Jacob is. I honestly would have preferred her be the game’s lead because she had a far greater emotional tie to the horrific events happening in Black iron than Jacob does.
But to burst the bubble on not spoiling things, the ending is a real kick in the teeth thanks to not resolving anything and just setting up a sequel. It came almost out of nowhere, similar to Halo 2’s cliff-hanger, and after a swift eight hours or so I had been expecting another three to four hours of story only to have the rug pulled out from underneath me and the credits slammed in my face.
Despite talking considerably more than Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke ever did, Jacob Lee is hollow and entirely one dimensional. It makes you wonder why they ever bothered to have him talk (or be mo-capped by Josh Duhamel) when he doesn’t even have as interesting a personality as Clarke did in the original Dead Space where he was completely silent. Without wanting to spoil too much of the game’s third act, Jacob is at odds with his own morality and blames himself for the outbreak in Black Iron, but this character motivation is difficult to get behind because he’s shouldering blame that isn’t his to bear and it makes him seem kind of pathetic.
Dani is a considerably more interesting character, played by Karen Fukuhara, and she delivers a decent performance considering how underwhelming the script is. Again, without spoiling too much of the late game reveals, she’s on the run for crimes she never committed and she’s considerably more resourceful and level; headed than Jacob is. I honestly would have preferred her be the game’s lead because she had a far greater emotional tie to the horrific events happening in Black iron than Jacob does.
But to burst the bubble on not spoiling things, the ending is a real kick in the teeth thanks to not resolving anything and just setting up a sequel. It came almost out of nowhere, similar to Halo 2’s cliff-hanger, and after a swift eight hours or so I had been expecting another three to four hours of story only to have the rug pulled out from underneath me and the credits slammed in my face.
The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. There’s a steep learning curve to combat in The Callisto Protocol and the first hour or so involved a lot of dying over and over again whilst I got to grips with how it wanted me to play. Once I got the hang of it the combat was really quite enjoyable, but then it didn’t do anything new or interesting for the rest of the game, so I grew tired of it around the mid-point and I went into every single combat encounter with the same tactics and walked out every single time with barely a scratch on me.
The game did throw me a bone in the last hour or so by presenting a mini-boss in the penultimate chapter, which was then repeated twice in the final chapter, before throwing a big full on final boss at me. But the problem was that these bosses were really just bullet sponges that served to clear you out of your ammo and health items. Because the final mini-boss encounter was so close to the final boss I actually didn’t have enough ammo for the final boss which made it considerably more frustrating than it should have been. It’s made more frustrating when you factor in that the final boss isn’t vulnerable to melee attacks which the combat is almost entirely reliant on because of the scarcity of ammo. There’re also two frustrating enemy types in the game that are impossible to avoid attacks from and feel like they’ve been designed simply to knock some health off you. One hides in crates and the other lunges as you from the corner of rooms, but neither are visible until they’ve attacked you and require a QTE to kill. It’s just bad enemy design.
Yes, the big difference between The Callisto Protocol and Dead Space is that Callisto leans more into melee combat than guns. There’s real weight behind it too, and it feels extremely satisfying once you get into the rhythm of it, however the dodging mechanics are less than self-explanatory. Where most games have a dedicated dodge button, Callisto instead asks you to simply move the left stick to the side, and provided you do it within the animation window for an enemy attack, Jacob will dodge it. This is fine in principle, but once you get more than one foe in a combat encounter, you’d best believe that you’re going to be spending almost the entire fight dodging until you can get lucky enough to get a swing or two in. Like I said, once I got the feel of the combat, I could navigate combat encounters with ease and it was fun for a little while, but as the game progresses and you just end up fighting the same enemy types over and over in larger numbers the more the game devolves into side -stepping enemy attacks for three minutes until you can chance a combo, or hope you have enough ammo to thin the crowd out before they get in too close.
Then comes the other puzzling changes from Dead Space come in the form of the audio and text logs found throughout Black Iron. In Dead Space audio logs would play automatically once picked up, but here in Callisto you need to enter the inventory menu and play it manually…oh and you can’t close the menu or the log will stop playing. It’s little design choices like that that make Callisto feel outdated and clunky, especially in comparison to its predecessor which came out almost fifteen years ago.
The game did throw me a bone in the last hour or so by presenting a mini-boss in the penultimate chapter, which was then repeated twice in the final chapter, before throwing a big full on final boss at me. But the problem was that these bosses were really just bullet sponges that served to clear you out of your ammo and health items. Because the final mini-boss encounter was so close to the final boss I actually didn’t have enough ammo for the final boss which made it considerably more frustrating than it should have been. It’s made more frustrating when you factor in that the final boss isn’t vulnerable to melee attacks which the combat is almost entirely reliant on because of the scarcity of ammo. There’re also two frustrating enemy types in the game that are impossible to avoid attacks from and feel like they’ve been designed simply to knock some health off you. One hides in crates and the other lunges as you from the corner of rooms, but neither are visible until they’ve attacked you and require a QTE to kill. It’s just bad enemy design.
Yes, the big difference between The Callisto Protocol and Dead Space is that Callisto leans more into melee combat than guns. There’s real weight behind it too, and it feels extremely satisfying once you get into the rhythm of it, however the dodging mechanics are less than self-explanatory. Where most games have a dedicated dodge button, Callisto instead asks you to simply move the left stick to the side, and provided you do it within the animation window for an enemy attack, Jacob will dodge it. This is fine in principle, but once you get more than one foe in a combat encounter, you’d best believe that you’re going to be spending almost the entire fight dodging until you can get lucky enough to get a swing or two in. Like I said, once I got the feel of the combat, I could navigate combat encounters with ease and it was fun for a little while, but as the game progresses and you just end up fighting the same enemy types over and over in larger numbers the more the game devolves into side -stepping enemy attacks for three minutes until you can chance a combo, or hope you have enough ammo to thin the crowd out before they get in too close.
Then comes the other puzzling changes from Dead Space come in the form of the audio and text logs found throughout Black Iron. In Dead Space audio logs would play automatically once picked up, but here in Callisto you need to enter the inventory menu and play it manually…oh and you can’t close the menu or the log will stop playing. It’s little design choices like that that make Callisto feel outdated and clunky, especially in comparison to its predecessor which came out almost fifteen years ago.
Visually The Callisto protocol does deliver in spades though. Playing it on a PS5 I was treated to some gorgeous high-quality graphics, with a smooth frame rate, and plenty of special touches to lighting and particle effects to make Black Iron, the monsters, and Jacob look like they truly belonged on the current generation of consoles. Whilst I’ve not played the last gen versions, I have seen the footage of how it runs, and it’s clear that Callisto is a ninth-generation game that has been stripped back significantly for eight gen systems.
The audio is great as you would hope from a horror game, particularly immersive with 3D audio, and enough to give you chills when things go eerily quiet. But it does lack a personality of sorts. Compared to Dead Space, the Ishimura had a particular sound to it as the metal creaked, automated announcements played in the distance, and screams could be heard in adjoining rooms. That’s absent in Callisto, and whilst it’s not a dealbreaker, this compounded with the other areas the game lacks in goes to show that there was significantly less attention put into the small aspects of Callisto that made Dead Space so iconic.
Part of me feels a little bad comparing everything Callisto does wrong to everything that Dead Space did right, but realistically this game is a spiritual successor made by a number of the same people…so why does it feel so stripped back and lazy in comparison to Dead Space? The bottom line is that there is fun to be had with The Callisto Protocol and I hope that if the game does get a sequel (unlikely considering the game’s poor sales), but Striking Distance Studios need to do more than make a pretty game, because there’s so much untapped potential with Callisto that Dead Space just innately had. If these developers managed this fourteen years ago, then they can absolutely manage it today.
The audio is great as you would hope from a horror game, particularly immersive with 3D audio, and enough to give you chills when things go eerily quiet. But it does lack a personality of sorts. Compared to Dead Space, the Ishimura had a particular sound to it as the metal creaked, automated announcements played in the distance, and screams could be heard in adjoining rooms. That’s absent in Callisto, and whilst it’s not a dealbreaker, this compounded with the other areas the game lacks in goes to show that there was significantly less attention put into the small aspects of Callisto that made Dead Space so iconic.
Part of me feels a little bad comparing everything Callisto does wrong to everything that Dead Space did right, but realistically this game is a spiritual successor made by a number of the same people…so why does it feel so stripped back and lazy in comparison to Dead Space? The bottom line is that there is fun to be had with The Callisto Protocol and I hope that if the game does get a sequel (unlikely considering the game’s poor sales), but Striking Distance Studios need to do more than make a pretty game, because there’s so much untapped potential with Callisto that Dead Space just innately had. If these developers managed this fourteen years ago, then they can absolutely manage it today.