The Callisto Protocol review: As a fan of Dead Space, I'm disappointed
The Callisto Protocol
Available on: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC
Developer: Striking Distance Studios | Publisher: Krafton
Release date: Dec. 2, 2022
Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains around 100 billion planets; our galaxy is only one of 2 trillion others that we can see. We know very little about the things in our tiny, 93 billion light-year observable corner of the universe. We know next to nothing outside of it.
There’s a reason space has been such a popular fixation in the horror genre. It’s a setting where our imaginations can run wild. One of the best examples of space horror among video games is the Dead Space series, which followed an engineer named Isaac Clarke (a reference to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, two of the “Big Three” writers in the golden age of science fiction) as he fought hordes of undead monsters and uncovered the mysterious cult that had been abetting their creation.
“The Callisto Protocol,” the first game from Striking Distance Studios, could easily be mistaken as a “Dead Space” spinoff. Striking Distance CEO Glen Schofield was one of the co-creators of “Dead Space,” and it shows. The two games share similarities in terms of story, presentation and mechanics — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Dead Space” was a great game, and many of the nods to that franchise work in “The Callisto Protocol’s” favor.
But the familiarity also made some of the plot points feel predictable. And unlike “Dead Space,” “The Callisto Protocol” suffers from spotty writing that gave me little reason to care about its universe or characters. Moreover, the game’s poor optimization for PC (which caused my frame rate to plummet during key moments) and middling weapon options marred what could have been a standard but perfectly serviceable horror game.
“The Callisto Protocol” puts you in the flight jacket of Jacob Lee (played by Josh Duhamel of “Transformers”), pilot of the cargo ship UJC Charon. Jacob is a hauler for the United Jupiter Company (UJC) who’s been making a series of shady deliveries between the planet’s moons Callisto and Europa. He’s on his last shipment run with his co-pilot Max when the ship is infiltrated by a squad led by Dani Nakamura (Karen Fukuhara of “The Boys”), a noted member of an anti-UJC guerrilla group called The Outer Way. During the resulting fight, the ship crash lands on Callisto and everyone on board dies except for Jacob and Dani. They are arrested by a patrol from the local prison, Black Iron, and immediately sentenced.
After being processed and thrown into his cell, Jacob wakes up on his first day in Black Iron to find that the prison is in the middle of a riot. This is where the real meat of the game starts, and the similarities to “Dead Space” become apparent.
Upon his arrival to Black Iron, Jacob was restrained and forced to undergo a gruesome surgery that grafted a device called the CORE onto his spine. The edginess of stabbing a monitoring tool into the back of someone’s neck without anesthetic is to show how dark and terrible Black Iron is, but for our purposes as players, CORE is a health bar. Anyone who has played “Dead Space” will recognize it as the equivalent of the RIG, which similarly displayed Isaac’s hit points with a light-up bar that ran down his suit.
The similarities with Dead Space don’t end there. Jacob wields a telekinetic device called the GRP that works identically to the Kinesis module. He stomps to finish off enemies or bust open crates, as Isaac does. “The Callisto Protocol’s” story, like that of Dead Space, relies heavily on audio logs to flesh out the details. Space zombies always seem to be the result of alien shenanigans and fanatical secret societies. Jacob and Isaac both have a bad habit of falling off things, each whoopsie a convenient excuse to lose an NPC companion and then regroup with them when an objective needs to be completed or the plot needs to progress.
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Ironically, zombies might be what sets the two games apart the most. In “Dead Space,” Isaac had to eliminate necromorphs by methodically tearing off their limbs using ranged weapons, and occasionally using melee or stomping to confirm the kill. “The Callisto Protocol” reverses this. You’ll start most of your fights in melee mode, using an essentially prompt-based combat system to wear down a zombie with your stun baton, weaving in a few gunshots here and there.
Here’s how most engagements went for me. A zombie would give chase. When it took a swing at me, I’d dodge the attack and follow up with a stun baton combo. Then I’d dodge again — this time to the right and then to the left, to evade both blows from the zombie’s two-strike combo — and counterattack with some more melee hits until the zombie starts sprouting tentacles from its stomach. If you let those grow for too long, the zombie evolves to become even stronger and harder to kill. At that point, I’d fire two shots into the creature’s tentacles, then stomp it as it collapsed on the floor until it burst apart like a cantaloupe, its body no longer twitching. It’s a satisfying combat loop, and you don’t need to be a gaming god to do it.
The dodge mechanic doesn’t require you to time anything. As long as you’re holding down left or right while in melee range of a zombie, you will dodge its strike. However, the direction in which you dodge matters. If you dodge in the same direction too many times, the mechanic will eventually fail you, having detected that you’re just going in the same direction over and over. You can easily avoid this by alternating between your left and your right with each dodge.
But while playing, it can feel like “The Callisto Protocol” focused on the game’s melee system to the detriment of other mechanics. All zombies have a hardy resistance to gunfire, ammo is scarce and resources are hard to come by. This made it difficult for me to experiment with different weapons because nearly all the obtainable guns have to be crafted at significant cost. Here was my dilemma, if you could call it that: Do I spend all my precious credits making a bunch of mediocre guns I can’t find ammo for? Or do I focus on buffing my small collection of free weapons to fight the progressively tougher and scarier zombies? It was a no-brainer — especially when it came to the GRP. It takes a lot of effort, risk, time and ammo to kill zombies with conventional combat. With the GRP, I can instakill almost every zombie in the game by hurling them into any of the gratuitously common spiked walls in the game (a horrifying safety hazard for UJC workers but a delightful mechanic for gamers). Cheesy, efficient and fun.
But OSHA-violating game levels aside, even if the crafting system was revised to encourage experimentation, I’m not sure how much my options would have changed. I could’ve converted my slow-firing but heavy-hitting starting pistol to something with a faster firing rate but less damage per bullet. But why? I doubt the time to kill a zombie would have changed dramatically. What incentive did I have to craft a handheld shotgun from scratch and upgrade it compared to the full-sized shotgun I received free? The alt-fire feature for the handheld shotgun offered homing rounds that tracked enemies, but that upgrade is functionally useless. Nearly everything in “The Callisto Protocol” is a shambling or huge target. You don’t exactly need an eagle eye to shoot anything here. You just need an eye.
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The game also has some significant issues on PC. During some fights, my frame rate plunged from 120-140 fps to 10-15 fps, turning the whole engagement into a frustrating slide show. This issue persisted even after I won the fight and left for a different area. The only way to fix the frame drops was to reload the game with a prayer that it wouldn’t happen again — and the checkpoints in this game can sometimes be punishing.
To Striking Studios’ credit, “The Callisto Protocol” features a robust accessibility menu. There are tons of options here including a special font for dyslexic gamers, a high contrast feature, an array of combat assistance features and more. And yet I struggled with other more rudimentary options. I couldn’t find a way to input a specific mouse sensitivity; the setting on offer appeared to be a clumsy direct port of the controller sensitivity settings, which went in increments of 10. Nor could I find an option to aim down sights using a click rather than a hold, which should be a standard feature in any game you aim in.
“The Callisto Protocol” has a fascinating premise — but doesn’t do anything with it. Somehow, the game about a celestial trucker fighting his way through zombies in a prison in space while uncovering a grand conspiracy orchestrated by the space Illuminati felt bland and generic. One of the great things about the Dead Space series is how it made Isaac’s job as an engineer matter in the game. Isaac’s trademark “weapon” is the plasma cutter, a tool that was designed to be used in mining operations. There are several sequences where Isaac must go out into the vacuum of space and traverse the hulls of destroyed starships using magnetic boots. The fanatical Church of Unitology in “Dead Space” was contextualized to the player through visiting their gathering places, seeing their posters plastered around the universe and hearing from its members.
There’s no gameplay mechanic or reference that makes Jacob’s background as a pilot relevant. It’s mildly important to the plot (you need to fly to escape a moon, after all), but he could’ve been a pastry chef and it wouldn’t have changed the game at all. You’d think being set in a space prison would also be a ripe opportunity to add little minigames involving hacking or maybe a deeper exploration of incarceration — but none of that exists. I learned that the UJC and The Outer Way are in bitter conflict with each other, but the game never told me why that conflict exists and what either party wants; given that, I found it difficult to care.
“The Callisto Protocol” is a visually impressive spiritual sibling of “Dead Space” that shadowed its big brother’s aesthetic and narrative but didn’t bother to make any of those things newly important in the context of a separate game. This is why so many games often star soldiers or military personnel, giving players a convenient reason for why the character is so good at shooting things without any explanation required. It’s why I’m also intrigued whenever a game features a protagonist that isn’t some sort of fighter — and why I consider it such a missed opportunity when developers don’t find ways to incorporate an unconventional protagonist’s background into the game.
Striking Distance’s debut is a swing and a miss, but “The Callisto Protocol” ends on a cliffhanger. If the studio decides to revisit the series with a sequel, I’m hoping the second outing will be better than the first.
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