I feel like every critic at one point or another has made this analogy. It feels a bit cliche to reference Revenge of the Sith, but as I stare into my collector’s edition Callisto Protocol statue, the same rage and sadness that overtook Obi-wan washes over me. You were the chosen one, I yell at the figure. The monstrous creature that resembles two zombies fused together does not respond. He only stares at that masked astronaut whose back is against a leaning pile of debris. He doesn’t respond either, he merely points his gun at the monstrous figure looking to make a meal of him. I continue to monologue: You were meant to bring balance to gaming, not leave it in darkness. The developer behind The Callisto Protocol was Striking Distance Studio. The studio was founded by Dead Space creative director, Glen Schofield, and contained many ex-Dead Space developers. With EA shutting down Dead Space developer Visceral Games and putting the series on ice after the disastrous Dead Space 3, this felt like the perfect comeback story for survival horror. Alas, this tale of redemption was not meant to be. I imagine my Callisto Protocol statue melting in the lava similar to Anakin, but it still remains, sitting in my living room as a monument to my foolishness. So much misplaced faith. Even though the statue sits there motionless, I swear some nights I can hear it writhing out in pain, whispering, “I hate you.”
Callisto Protocol begins with pilot Jacob Lee delivering cargo to Jupiter’s dead moon Callisto for the United Jupiter Corporation. Claiming to his partner, Max, that this last shipment will be enough to allow them to stop doing these deliveries, Jacob effectively dooms both him and Max. Fate punishes Jacob’s hubris by having his ship boarded causing it to crash down to the frozen waste of Callisto. A guard from Callisto’s Black Iron Prison arrives on the scene and immediately arrests Jacob for unclear motives. Once the guard is done gloating over Jacob, he is thrown in a cell and the mayhem begins. As if the game snapped its fingers, a zombie outbreak within the prison begins. Jacob is able to break out of his cell and works with a fellow inmate in an attempt to escape the prison. I certainly wasn’t worried about the threadbare narrative the game had set up. Dead Space also had a bit of a small narrative with Issac being an engineer tasked with seeing what was wrong with the mining station, USG Ishimura. Much like Dead Space, I expected the broad narrative to unfold as I tried to escape the gruesome prison.
What I was not expecting was the vile thrashing the first few monstrosities were planning on giving me. In order to differentiate itself from Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol focuses on melee combat. You pick up a makeshift axe from a dead inmate and must use it to defend yourself from the immediate attackers. Eventually, you find a baton for a guard outpost and it becomes your primary melee weapon. The meaty swings of the baton weren’t my problem: defending myself against the zombies was. For starters, there is no lock-on system. The more savvy of you gamers are already raising an eyebrow. Even the more challenging third-person action games like Dark Souls, allow to lock onto an enemy. I can certainly work with the lack of lock-on, but what kills it for me is to dodge you must hold left or right on the left stick. The same stick you use to move around. Frequently I found myself attempting to strafe around an enemy hoping to dodge the first strike, but the game wouldn’t recognize the input as a dodge. Instead of dodging my undead assailant, Jacob just keeps strafing left until the blow causes him to recoil in pain. Don’t worry, this system becomes even more of a mess when you add multiple enemies into the mix. Having the same input for moving and dodging just felt so cumbersome, that I can’t help but feel like some different control scheme would have suited this game better.
There are guns introduced in Callisto Protocol which might explain why there is no lock-on feature, but surely the solution would be you could only lock on enemies while using the baton. Especially since this is a survival horror game where ammo pickups are supposed to be scarce. You also gain the ability to pick up enemies with a telekinesis module and throw those enemies into environmental hazards. Unfortunately, this picking enemies up always felt clunky, leading me to focus on my guns. Later in the game, you are introduced to zombies who will sprout tentacles and morph into stronger enemies. You ideally want to conserve ammo to shoot those tentacles within that moment, similar to how Dead Space wanted you to shoot necromorphs in the limbs. So if you are like me, trying to gun everything down because you don’t like the melee combat system, you might be frequently caught with your pants down. Numerous times I would be stuck in a reload animation as tentacles rip through the corpse of an enemy and I would be stuck there praying the animations finished in time. Usually, my prayers fell on deaf ears.
The animations within Callisto Protocol are also criminal. Simply reloading and switching weapons feel so inelegant. Since the guns are all 3d printed onto the handle of the base design, Jacob needs to disassemble a gun just to reassemble a new gun. This means if you run out of ammo on the pistol and need to switch to a mini-shotgun called the Skunk gun, you better hope there are no enemies around. A lot of these animations can be interrupted by a simple melee swing. Gone are the days of Issac quickly switching weapons or using a health pack in Dead Space. In order for Jacob to be healed, he must get down on one knee, stick the health injector into his neck, and slowly watch as his health bar resembling a barcode creep back to full. Nobody ever thought Dead Space would be better if it made you sit through similar overlong animations. Some might say these animations are made to make the game look more cinematic. I would respond by saying this is a game, not a movie, and if these animations do not aid me in combat then they are nothing but a hindrance.
Early in the game, I reached a checkpoint with very low health. Fortunately, there was a health injector a few feet ahead of me. Naturally, I shuffled over, grabbed the health injector, and sat through the drawn-out animation. Hoping to avoid sitting through this tedious process, I saved the game in the menus screen. A few moments later, a zombie snuck up on me while I was fighting a different zombie and finished me off. The game didn’t respawn me the moment I had saved, but back at the original checkpoint. Prompting me to be completely confused about why you can even bother saving in the menu if it will dump you back at your last checkpoint. Dead Space allowed you to save the game as many times as you want barring you are near a save station. It is so minor to be complaining about how the game is saved, but all these minor nitpicks are like grasping hands clawing onto the game and dragging it down.
By the end of the first chapter, I had enough of the sloppy combat, intrusive animations, and all the other nonsense thrown my way. I dreaded continuing onward. Merely to see what else Callisto Protocol had in store, I decided to drop the difficulty of the game from medium to easy; a decision I do not take lightly. Now, I am a firm medium man. I feel medium is the difficulty most developers design as the average experience, and you can change the difficulty if you want more or less of a challenge. There has been a handful of games that I have had to drop the difficulty of, and none of them walked away favorably. Callisto Protocol is certainly not an exception to that rule.
I knew dropping the difficulty would result in more health and ammo and less incoming damage from the zombies. I also figured any tension the game was working toward would drop with an audible thud. To be honest, though, I wasn’t getting any sense of dread or unease that you get from wandering the quiet halls of the USG Ishimura or the eerie streets of Silent Hill. Callisto Protocol felt more like walking down the hallway of a middle school, desperately trying to avoid eye contact with a bully so he won’t take your lunch money. A zombie ambushing me didn’t make me jump in fright but groan in frustration as I had to reload my weapon. I am aware that horror is hard to get right; you are walking on a knife’s edge. Too oppressive, and your players get frustrated. Too relaxed, and you start to wonder if the game has any teeth. I’ll admit, dropping to easy did remove the fangs from the game, but I was not going to sit there and become numb to the game due to the game’s oppressive nature. Frankly, the death of Callisto Protocol’s tension is my burden to bear but should be laid squarely at the feet of the game’s haphazard combat system.
The game’s enemy design also doesn’t help with the game’s atmosphere. Both the zombies in Callisto Protocol are no different from the Necromorphs in Dead Space, however, I can’t help but feel like more imagination went into the nercomorphs. Your basic nercomorph has a more distinct visual outline: stocky body with long outstretched arms that arch over its body with blades jutting out of its wrist. Your standard enemy in Callisto Protocol is just a zombie. They are apparently called Biophages, but I only know that cause I looked it up online. I don’t even remember characters calling them that. I had hoped trailers for Callisto Protocol were only showing the basics enemies and were holding back the cooler enemies for surprise reveals. Unfortunately, that rarely happened.
In fact, the few variations in enemies lack the creativity enemies in Dead Space received. Let me introduce Dead Space’s Exploder. While his name isn’t very creative, I would say his striking silhouette stands out. Small spindly body, with exaggerated arms; one arm containing a bulbous glowing sac. You learn early that if you don’t deal with this enemy quickly, there will be trouble. Callisto Protocol has similar enemies that will explode if you don’t deal with them. What do they look like? A zombie cut in half with a similar bulbous glowing sac on its back. I feel like I have seen Callisto Protocol’s iteration a dozen times before, but I really see anything reassembling the nercomorph Exploder. To make matters worse, Callisto Protocol has been copying off The Last of Us’s homework by including blind enemies that will swarm you like the Clickers. You are able to sneak up on these blind enemies and any other unsuspecting enemies to kill them with a backstab, but honestly, who asked for The Last of Us-style stealth mechanics in my spiritual successor to Dead Space?
However, there is one enemy that I think is really creatively designed: The Two-Headed Brute. This monstrosity, which I refer to as the Twins, is two zombies fused together with this jaw running down their center like a zipper. The monster can’t be stabbed or meleed, so you have to shoot it. After a certain amount of damage, he will kneel to the ground where you need to beat him with your baton. The Twins will immediately lose faith in the “two heads are better than one” belief AND RIP ONE OF THE ZOMBIES OFF ITS BODY LIKE A WISHBONE. The remaining twin will go berserk, running and swinging at you faster than before. I love this enemy design; the gruesome nature combined with its animalist urge to cut off its dead weight is truly a site. Once again, this combat system fails this fight. For starters, two hits from the Twins will kill you even on the lowest difficulty. They are also very bullet spongy, and while, I would expect these beefy boys to be able to take all these shots, it does mean you will need to sit through an overlong reload animation. If you get hit by a light breeze during these reload animations, you will need to start over. Don’t even try to switch weapons during the fight with the Twins, you are just asking to get knocked out in one punch. I am sorry boys, you deserved better.
If it’s not clear by now, I think this combat system is the core problem with Callisto Protocol. Like a house with a rotting frame, everything comes crumbling down because the systems supporting all of it do not work. The threadbare story, weak enemy design, and toothless atmosphere could have been overlooked if the combat was able to marry the idea of melee and ranged. I firmly believe someone at Striking Distance Studio, needed to make the call to stop working on the game and fix the combat system before continuing to add everything else into the mix. I dare not say it would have been a tough call. People who invested in Striking Distance Studio would be very upset. The game most certainly would have been delayed, but if they truly wanted a game we would herald as the true successor to Dead Space, they needed to get the combat right.
So here we are. The good guys have failed. An evil corporation like EA gets to have the last laugh. I am just sitting here with a statue that I swear I hear painfully screaming its hatred for me. The disappointment consumes me. I wanted nothing more than Callisto Protocol to be good. At last, it was not meant to be. I hope Striking Distance Studio is able to bounce back, learn from its failure and not become the villain with hatred in its heart. I certainly look forward to that day, but I promise myself I will not get burned the same way Callisto Protocol burned me. I will hope that every game that comes out is as good as the last, but I will also be prepared to fall. I will remain cautiously optimistic. Forever on guard.
