The big thing with Dead Space was how the main thrust of the combat was the cutting off of limbs, the means of definitely taking down a necromorph. Dead Space, even with its silly looking necromorphs, knew how to amp that up, keeping you on your toes when it came to its encounter design, but The Callisto Protocol merely throws more waves of shambling monsters at you as a means of ratcheting up the action. Once you know that regardless of how you fight, creatures will eventually die after shooting or whacking them enough times, even the sense of tension goes away completely when playing. Why hello there, stranger! Here, let me give you a squeeze! The Callisto Protocol repeats the same scare tactics over and over again, and they quickly become predictable to the point of being comic in the course of its 10-hour run. Once you’ve seen the first few jump scares such as monsters coming out of grates or somewhere behind you, or the game’s equivalent of the Alien facehugger jumps out from a chest or locker out at you, you’ve seen it all. For a game going for that vibe, it’s an absolute bummer. The Callisto Protocol’s greatest weakness, though, it’s its total lack of horror. It’s just more convenient to use bullets after a certain point in the game. Sadly, though, the more you invest on your ranged arsenal, the less you end up going for hand to hand kills due to the sheer abundance of ammo and the ridiculous imbalance of power between melee and ranged attacks. When you pick your first gun up, encounters do get a tad more involved, since the more hits you manage to land, you eventually get the opportunity to get a shot in, which can help end engagements more quickly. Meaning that it doesn’t matter which side you dodge to, regardless of where the attack is coming from, you don’t get hit. The actual hits and crunches when properly getting attacks in feel great as they should, but due to the clunky implementation of dodging, which is used interchangeably to the left and right, and back for blocking, much like in a very watered-down version of Punch-Out!! without any sense of timing or countering applied as an attempt to offer minimal depth to combat. Speaking of bats, your initial means of defense is a pipe, which moments later is replaced by an upgradeable stun baton. Coupled with the weaving and bobbing that the all too simplistic melee system in the game has you doing and the overall strength, resilience and aggressiveness of the enemies and the relative weak state you start the game at, it all makes for a brutal experience right off the bat, even on the normal difficulty setting. For starters, Jacob is a very stiff, slow moving character. you get it, right? Don’t run to towards the light!Īnd there’s certainly going to be a lot of chances at that happening since The Callisto Protocol’s combat is sort of a mess in many ways. The whole place erupts into chaos when a mysterious affliction begins to change every human there into horrible, deadly mutants, and his only chance at escaping the ordeal is to beat the ever-living crap out of anything that stands in his way before they get a chance to rip his face off, or slash him in half, or gouge out his eyes, or…. Unfortunately for Jacob, his troubles upon getting to the prison are just the tip of a very high shit pile, since pretty much as soon as he checks in, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. It’s certainly one hell of a start, rivaling that of a high budget action movie, with plenty of visual and audio flair. A rebel group is apparently responsible for the deal gone wrong, and upon being rescued, you’re put in prison as a regular inmate, along with the sole surviving member of the apparent terrorists. As the space trucker Jacob, you crash land on the Jupiter moon of Callisto while going on a supply run to the local Black Iron prison. Even though it’s certainly a technical showcase, The Callisto Protocol lacks the atmosphere and pacing that made Dead Space so great to begin with, resulting in a game that isn’t scary at all, but just a plain gross, gory show that has no punch to speak of. Glen Schofield’s studio Striking Distance’s debut title, The Callisto Protocol, is admittedly a work based on most of the team’s previous work in Dead Space, when they were still part of Visceral Games.
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