The Callisto Protocol is the ideological heir to Dead Space from Dead Space creator Glenn Scofield. From the first shows, the network game for some reason began to be terribly advertised, in comparison with the progenitor. But not with the one released in 2008, but with its nostalgic copy with memories blurred by time. As a result, The Callisto Protocol turned out to be the successor to the real Dead Space, with approximately the same problems and at the same level of quality.
The Callisto Protocol takes place in the Tin Space Prison
It is located on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. The conditions of detention in “Tin” are really tin. With tormentors and murky medical interventions on the bodies of prisoners. The protagonist, space-traveling Jacob, ends up behind bars by accident, but doesn’t really have time to enjoy the prison romance. Within hours of his arrival on Callisto, something terrible happens. As a result, everything burns down, prisoners and personnel are hacked to pieces, and mutant zombies run along the corridors.
At first, the goal is simple: download. But over time it becomes clear that before running away it would be nice to understand what is happening here, otherwise there is no point in “running away”. As in the original Dead Space, the story in Callisto is minimal. The scenario is somewhat revealed only through mockingly short (some seconds long) audio diaries scattered around the prison. Only at the end does the picture unfold, the game universe is overgrown with lore and reserves for the continuation of the banquet. I won’t spoil, but the scenario turns will make you remember Dead Space all over again.
Is it possible to finally criticize the game for the almost complete lack of plot? And how! Especially in the context of the fact that the developers probably spent a lot of money to lure Josh Duhamel and Karen Fukuhara into the lead roles and have Unreal Engine 4 produce photorealistic faces with live animation. What’s the point? But with the plot and in the original Dead Space everything was the same. For most of the game, Isaac Clarke silently smeared the heads of the Necromorphs with iron shit, and the whole wagon with the Church of UNITOlogy floated only at the very end. And fighting horror is, frankly, forgivable.
The Callisto protocol scares Dead Space’s own methods, and they don’t work
Here, too, we wander through the seedy corridors smeared with blood and shit, frightened by the rustling and jumping of monsters. Or rather, we should be afraid, but something is wrong. The big question is why?
Perhaps the classic howlers, howling creatures from around the corner and flashing light bulbs have simply become obsolete, or even never really worked. Or the thing is, I remember Dead Space itself well, and the scarecrows are too familiar. Or maybe it’s all about the design.
Even the original Dead Space didn’t scare me, but it was still uncomfortable. And largely thanks to the design of the environment. The Ishimura was designed so crudely and utilitarianly that in its best days it must have had a horror look without the guts on the walls. What was happening visually resembled the film Event Horizon, high-tech, but some kind of dirty and hopeless science fiction. On the other hand, of course, the necromorphs. Mutilated and broken human bodies crawling in the dark, eager to cut off your legs with some kind of sharp growths – this is a powerful plus for the atmosphere of “Fuck it”.
And the Callisto protocol is a generic in this regard. The game looks great, the variety and detail of the locations is okay, but it doesn’t have its striking visual style. This is already an average modern science fiction, in places it generally gives off “Mass Effect”. And the monsters, even though they sometimes cosplay necromorphs, still lose to them in disgust and cause no shock. In this respect, the game is closer to Resident Evil than Dead Space. However, with the exception of non-working scarecrows, this isn’t a big deal. Because in the case of The Callisto Protocol, the blandness of the design is redeemed by the excellent work with the light, the most beautiful sound (it’s almost ASMR) and really powerful graphics, which is not ashamed to be called the “current generation ” .
Callisto Protocol is a silly but fun game
In this regard, it doesn’t lose to Dead Space, although it lacks its powerful celling mechanics like shooting monster limbs with a laser cutter. Here we pound flesh from a rough, rumbling weapon and smack it furiously first with a crowbar and then with a futuristic police baton. At the same time, the blood flows in liters and the limbs still scatter in all directions. The game also borrowed from Dead Space the ability to stomp defeated enemies so that loot spills out of them. And it’s damn good! Because it is tactilely juicy and is perceived as a powerful gesture of victory. It is impossible to resist and not trample the defeated boss into minced meat.
But there is an ambiguous moment in the combat system. The Callisto protocol has long focused on close combat, and therefore has a dodge system that not everyone liked. Even before the enemy attacks, you need to keep to the right or left and the character is sure to dodge. If you dodge left, but the monster combos and swings again, you now need to press right, and so on. There are also ideal dodges, counters and blocks, but you can live without them – the essence is so basic.
Some players didn’t like the simplicity of this mechanic – you don’t even have to guess the direction of the enemy’s attack! But for fast-paced combat horror, such simplifications are quite suitable for themselves – this is a single-player linear game about fun, not salt-like. Others noted that such a dodging system does not work in battles with crowds of enemies: Jacob can only dodge one enemy, while others can easily scratch their backs at this moment. This is partly true, but not entirely.
The adoption of the Callisto Protocol combat system involves three stages
At first, enemies rarely move in groups, battles are mostly one-on-one. At this point, the combat system just feels weird. Yes, there is a feeling that everything is somehow too simple. However, it is very pleasant to poke zombie heads with all the dope with anything in The Callisto Protocol, it quickly becomes clear. The game successfully sells its bloody rampage.
Then the enemies begin to stop Jacob in groups, and he has only a stick and a flimsy, unpumped pistol. If you leave the game right now, you can be left with the opinion that he is shit and the combat system in it is broken. But it doesn’t last that long, literally an hour.
And then Jacob gets hold of a rifle and a kinetic module, and that’s when the Callisto Protocol is revealed. If you combine the entire arsenal of the hero, then there are no problems in battles with mobs: you grab someone with telekinesis and throw them on spikes, shoot someone with an explosive gas canister, shoot someone in the leg and hit someone with head with a club – effective and fun! Close combat becomes part of the “big” combat mechanics and ceases to be its basis.
However, that doesn’t mean there are no problems.
In close combat, the camera is fixed on the enemy and does not want to break away from him until you finish him off – even dodging only works against him. Indeed, having entered into close combat, he completely loses the ability to somehow control the crowd – by itself, in mass battles, this annoys and interferes. Well, when you try to run away from a herd of mutants, it becomes obvious that the enemies’ attacks are too strongly magnetized for the hero. This makes for some suffocating battles. But there is still much more fun in the game, so the impressions are not very blurry.
However, in the second part (if there is one, the results of the first are still modest) there is definitely something to improve. And it’s not just about crowd control – it would be nice to add at least some kind of game setting. There’s not exactly an interesting situation in the game. Only arenas with zombies. If there are a lot of zombies, there will certainly be spikes, bolt cutters and abysses to throw them there. It’s all fantasy. At the tenth hour of passing he begins to get a little tired.
Well, it would be nice to see normal optimization next time. Now the problems with stutter and frame drops on PC and Xbox are not so bad anymore (after a couple of tens of gigabyte patches), but they are still far from ideal.
The Callisto Protocol looks like a game from the Xbox 360 era. It’s a brutal and bloody action game: not very long, not burdened with revolutionary ideas and completely linear.
In fact, with all the cons of The Callisto Protocol, it really pulls for the title of singles messiah in 2022, because that’s exactly what they no longer do. It’s just that the season pass ruins the picture a bit. Well, there’s a certain irony in the fact that messiah is a stupid, but beautiful action movie for seven out of ten, we live in these times.
Unseen: Five great (and bad) scenes from Dead Space 2
