The Callisto Protocol
SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.
I encountered technical issues with The Callisto Protocol (TCP) before I even played the game. On my PC the game would not even launch. I used another PC to play the game, where it worked fine most of the time, until about 75% of the way through, where all my auto-saves disappeared, and I lost about an hour of progress.
After some Googling around, I found the work-around on a reddit post from a year ago, and managed to recover, but it was a bit scary. TCP is the first time in a long time that I can remember encountering such a major bug in a game that at least looks like a AAA game, and I played Cyberpunk 2077 for like 100 hours.
The game is pretty good for its 12 hours or so of gameplay. Visually the game looks fantastic. The story is fairly standard, the enemies some mix of Deadspace zombies with The Last of Us clickers. The whole game though feels like the dev team ran out of time. For instance, there are what look clearly like Metro style work benches strewn about the levels which you can’t interact with. Where they added to be able to further customize your weapons, and then that functionality scrapped when the dev team ran out of time, but left in the game anyway?
The dodging mechanism is completely overpowered. Without a time window or stamina count down, the vast majority of enemy attacks can be too easily avoided by alternately strafing left and right, which is something you were probably going to be doing anyway. The biggest “challenge” in combat if you can call it that is to find enough breathing room to bring up the crappy menu to select a 3rd weapon, as the means to switch weapons beyond two is embedded in a horrible pick list you have to bring up and then select from instead of a Doom-like tried-and-true number-key-for-each weapon system.
One could argue that this is part of the game being the in “survival” and not “3rd person shooter” genre, but resources are so abundant and the melee attack so over powered that it hardly feels like a survival game at all. Again, it feels like instead of being able to fine tune the difficulty level, the devs just left in a bunch of game mechanics and said “maybe this will work”.
For all the clear influence of the Dead Space games on the gameplay, the game leaves out some of the key mechanics which make Dead Space a challenging and interesting game. In Dead Space, one of the key gameplay mechanics is that the player can only save at certain save points. In game save points eliminate the ability to do save spamming, which of course increases the difficulty level. In TCP, you can save as often as you want, significantly reducing the challenge.
In Dead Space, dismemberment is a key game mechanic, as enemies can take a significantly higher amount of damage if you do not target their limbs, which, given limited ammo, can become a real problem. So, you have to match the right weapon to the right enemy, and carefully aim to dismember their limbs, consistently, otherwise you can’t get through the game. Isaac, the player’s character in Dead Space, is so damn slow that avoiding enemies or dodging is rarely an good option; just a few enemies attacking at the same time are enough to overwhelm him if you don’t put down enemies quickly.
In CST, the player’s character is Jacob, who is some damn nimble that you can avoid most enemies easily. Combined with the aforementioned uber-dodge, the game ends up being “pretty” but not deeply engaging.
I picked up CST as a free game off Epic, so for that price, it is worth the hassles. But at the list price of $60, it would be a hard pass.
The game seems to have been abandoned by its developers. When I encountered the launch problem which I mentioned in the beginning of this review, I dutifully filed a ticket with the developer using their online form, providing all the documentation they requested to be able to triage the issue. Their system did not issue me a ticket number in response, or even send an automated email to indicate that my ticket was submitted. As of this writing, the last patch to the game seems to have been in July of 2023, meaning that the auto-saves disappearing issue I encountered is unlikely to ever be resolved. If I had paid $60 for the game and encountered all the issues I’m listing, I’d be demanding a refund. So, caveat emptor, if you due run into any issues playing this game, you are on your own.