The Callisto Protocol [video game, review]
Jul. 6th, 2023 04:03 pmThe Callisto Protocol is a horror-on-a-space-station video game produced by Striking Distance Studios and directed by Glen Schoefield, one of the original creators of Dead Space. It wants so hard to be Dead Space, and yet fails so utterly in that singular goal, that it’s hard to take seriously.
I will warn you that there are plot spoilers, including the twist ending, in this review.
The main character, Jacob Lee, is voiced by Josh Duhamel, who started his career as a soap opera star but is probably most known recently as the Bill Lennox, the lead commander of the pro-robot military unit in the Michael Bay Transformers movie series, and the main character’s design captures Duhamel’s look very well. Jacob is a cargo pilot whose circuit takes his ship past Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where the Black Iron Prison is kept. A crisis on board causes his ship to crash, and Jacob is captured, implanted with an inmate brain monitoring device, and thrown into the prison, where everything then goes to hell in a very familiar Dead Space way. Jacob’s job is, naturally, to escape this hell and return to his original life. The plot has other plans for him.
The problem with The Callisto Protocol is that Dead Space came out 14 years ago and it’s still a superior game experience. The combat in Callisto wants to be more visceral and up-close, so ammunition for the few guns you scrounge off dead prison guards is scarce and your most frequently used weapon is a military-grade stun baton that, with a few upgrades, delivers deadly blows to the not-very-smart, not-very-robust zombies. The developers apparently wanted the combat to feel up-close so the animation is full of blood and guts, but there are only so many scripted animations a team can cook up independently and while there are several hundred such animations, delivering them makes the game feel more like a platformer where it’s just timing and remembering a button sequence and then it’s over. Over and over, and then it’s over. Dead Space relied much more heavily on the game engine to deliver the experience, so the varieties of deaths and combat sequences was significantly greater.
There’s a sequence where you have to walk across Callisto’s surface to get to a spaceship hanger, and it looks so much like another game that I though, “Ah, we’re in the Dead Space 3 part of the game now.” There are crafting benches (another Dead Space 3 mechanic), you get a “force projecting glove” (Dead Space 1’s “grip”), and you stomp zombies and cargo boxes for supplies.
Basically both Issac and Jacob (and aren’t those telling names!) find themselves in a vacuum-hazard human-made facility in deep space where a shadowy organization has “found something” and released it, causing massive mutation and zombification of everything and everyone, from which they have to escape, hampered constantly by some wide-eyed zealot and his minions, surviving as the facility falls apart from the constant misuse by zombies and the lack of maintenance. But Callisto doesn’t quite seem to understand what made Dead Space so compelling, and Jacob’s demeanor throughout the game doesn’t seem to gel into a whole and meaningful character. The worst internal struggled he has is over his guilt that his flight partner died messily and painfully in the crash at the beginning of the game. He’s in the fight to prevent the Callisto infection from breaking out but it often seems that he’s only in it because his allies, such as they are and what there are of them, will only help him escape if he helps them get the word out. Issac wanted something positive; he wanted to rescue Nicole. Jacob just wants to get the hell out of the game.
The DLC, The Callisto Protocol: Final Transmission, makes it very clear that the producers didn’t understand what made even Dead Space 3 worth playing. [Warning: here be the spoilers!] In both games, in the last chapter, the heroes find themselves alive after what should have been a fatally cataclysmic ending. And in both games, they start to experience very weird hallucinations, with maps that don’t make sense and encounters that are just surreal. In Dead Space 3, however, Isaac escapes from the cause of those hallucinations and makes it back to Sol just in time to see that the invasion of the Necromorph hives has begun. There’s no suggestion that what happens there is “all a dream;” the risks and battles Isaac faces in Dead Space 3: Awakened are never presented as anything but part of his ongoing struggle to deal with the Necromorphic influence over his life. But “… it was all a dream” is the ending of The Callisto Protocol; Jacob was fatally wounded in the previous chapter and is hallucinating everything that happens; every battle is a metaphor for him trying to save his life as the doctor character struggles to extract from his brain implant all the data he has collected along the way to implicate the shadowy organization and give humanity a fighting chance against the Callisto infection. The last chapter of Dead Space 3 left an opening for another game, one in which Isaac tries to survive in deep space, gather allies, and find a way to fight back. The Callisto Protocol implies heavily that that’s where you’re going until the very last scene. It’s a violation of the player’s trust that’s on par with the “twist” ending of Prey (2017), another game with an ending so bad it ruined the whole story for me.
The final boss battle is incredibly frustrating, as it’s a sheer RNG drop; you just have to get lucky and manage to hit the monster about 30 times with a hammer without somehow triggering its insta-kill melee move. You’ll die and reload that battle a dozen times or more until you get it. That’s it. And for the developers, that’s probably fine as they proudly announced that they crafted a dozen different death animations for that battle.
Speaking of death animations, Callisto is a very, uh, pretty game. The graphics are amazing and high-quality, and the dozens of “Jacob dies” animations are so carefully detailed that the development team, given a choice between re-rendering them with less gore or being unsold in some countries, decided they’d rather be banned than edit them.
But incredible graphics and sound design can’t hide the simple fact that The Callisto Protocol is a shallow, if expensive, knock-off of a much better game. It has no heart and offers nothing new. The derivative story, incredibly derivative mechanics when they work and incredibly frustrating mechanics when they don’t, and storyline abuse of the player’s trust makes the game much less than it could have been. I can’t recommend it.
I will warn you that there are plot spoilers, including the twist ending, in this review.
The main character, Jacob Lee, is voiced by Josh Duhamel, who started his career as a soap opera star but is probably most known recently as the Bill Lennox, the lead commander of the pro-robot military unit in the Michael Bay Transformers movie series, and the main character’s design captures Duhamel’s look very well. Jacob is a cargo pilot whose circuit takes his ship past Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where the Black Iron Prison is kept. A crisis on board causes his ship to crash, and Jacob is captured, implanted with an inmate brain monitoring device, and thrown into the prison, where everything then goes to hell in a very familiar Dead Space way. Jacob’s job is, naturally, to escape this hell and return to his original life. The plot has other plans for him.
The problem with The Callisto Protocol is that Dead Space came out 14 years ago and it’s still a superior game experience. The combat in Callisto wants to be more visceral and up-close, so ammunition for the few guns you scrounge off dead prison guards is scarce and your most frequently used weapon is a military-grade stun baton that, with a few upgrades, delivers deadly blows to the not-very-smart, not-very-robust zombies. The developers apparently wanted the combat to feel up-close so the animation is full of blood and guts, but there are only so many scripted animations a team can cook up independently and while there are several hundred such animations, delivering them makes the game feel more like a platformer where it’s just timing and remembering a button sequence and then it’s over. Over and over, and then it’s over. Dead Space relied much more heavily on the game engine to deliver the experience, so the varieties of deaths and combat sequences was significantly greater.
There’s a sequence where you have to walk across Callisto’s surface to get to a spaceship hanger, and it looks so much like another game that I though, “Ah, we’re in the Dead Space 3 part of the game now.” There are crafting benches (another Dead Space 3 mechanic), you get a “force projecting glove” (Dead Space 1’s “grip”), and you stomp zombies and cargo boxes for supplies.
Basically both Issac and Jacob (and aren’t those telling names!) find themselves in a vacuum-hazard human-made facility in deep space where a shadowy organization has “found something” and released it, causing massive mutation and zombification of everything and everyone, from which they have to escape, hampered constantly by some wide-eyed zealot and his minions, surviving as the facility falls apart from the constant misuse by zombies and the lack of maintenance. But Callisto doesn’t quite seem to understand what made Dead Space so compelling, and Jacob’s demeanor throughout the game doesn’t seem to gel into a whole and meaningful character. The worst internal struggled he has is over his guilt that his flight partner died messily and painfully in the crash at the beginning of the game. He’s in the fight to prevent the Callisto infection from breaking out but it often seems that he’s only in it because his allies, such as they are and what there are of them, will only help him escape if he helps them get the word out. Issac wanted something positive; he wanted to rescue Nicole. Jacob just wants to get the hell out of the game.
The DLC, The Callisto Protocol: Final Transmission, makes it very clear that the producers didn’t understand what made even Dead Space 3 worth playing. [Warning: here be the spoilers!] In both games, in the last chapter, the heroes find themselves alive after what should have been a fatally cataclysmic ending. And in both games, they start to experience very weird hallucinations, with maps that don’t make sense and encounters that are just surreal. In Dead Space 3, however, Isaac escapes from the cause of those hallucinations and makes it back to Sol just in time to see that the invasion of the Necromorph hives has begun. There’s no suggestion that what happens there is “all a dream;” the risks and battles Isaac faces in Dead Space 3: Awakened are never presented as anything but part of his ongoing struggle to deal with the Necromorphic influence over his life. But “… it was all a dream” is the ending of The Callisto Protocol; Jacob was fatally wounded in the previous chapter and is hallucinating everything that happens; every battle is a metaphor for him trying to save his life as the doctor character struggles to extract from his brain implant all the data he has collected along the way to implicate the shadowy organization and give humanity a fighting chance against the Callisto infection. The last chapter of Dead Space 3 left an opening for another game, one in which Isaac tries to survive in deep space, gather allies, and find a way to fight back. The Callisto Protocol implies heavily that that’s where you’re going until the very last scene. It’s a violation of the player’s trust that’s on par with the “twist” ending of Prey (2017), another game with an ending so bad it ruined the whole story for me.
The final boss battle is incredibly frustrating, as it’s a sheer RNG drop; you just have to get lucky and manage to hit the monster about 30 times with a hammer without somehow triggering its insta-kill melee move. You’ll die and reload that battle a dozen times or more until you get it. That’s it. And for the developers, that’s probably fine as they proudly announced that they crafted a dozen different death animations for that battle.
Speaking of death animations, Callisto is a very, uh, pretty game. The graphics are amazing and high-quality, and the dozens of “Jacob dies” animations are so carefully detailed that the development team, given a choice between re-rendering them with less gore or being unsold in some countries, decided they’d rather be banned than edit them.
But incredible graphics and sound design can’t hide the simple fact that The Callisto Protocol is a shallow, if expensive, knock-off of a much better game. It has no heart and offers nothing new. The derivative story, incredibly derivative mechanics when they work and incredibly frustrating mechanics when they don’t, and storyline abuse of the player’s trust makes the game much less than it could have been. I can’t recommend it.
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