What a time to be a Survival Horror fan! Within 4 months we will get remakes of 2 of the all-time greats in the genre in Dead Space Remake and Resident Evil 4 Remake. Before that though, Glen Schofield and Striking Distance Studios are giving us the spiritual successor to Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol. The Callisto Protocol is a gorgeous, gory, and challenging 3rd person survival horror game from the creator of the original Dead Space. It wears its survival horror inspirations on its sleeve (or maybe on its LED Health Meter placed on its protagonist’s back) and walks away mostly successful as a survival horror game for the modern age.
Storytelling In The Callisto Protocol
The Callisto Protocol starts off about as by the numbers as any sci-if horror adventure could, with your player crash landing their spaceship, getting separated from their peers, and then being left to pick up the pieces of this alien mystery. But where The Callisto Protocol starts off without any real heart, I found the story that Striking Distance Studios tells through the roughly 8-10 hour campaign to progress nicely with a balanced dose of heart, mystery, and sci-fi goodness.
You play as Jacob, a cargo pilot who crash lands on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons and home to Black Iron Prison. Black Iron Prison is where most of your journey takes place as the outbreak spreads and you try to escape. Along the way, you will meet a solid cast of characters that are for the most part really well-acted. Seeing Sam Witwer is always a joy, and Karen Fukuhara does a great job, although it took me a while to warm up to her character. Josh Duhamel is a great gruff protagonist and I was thrilled to be on this blockbuster ride glued to his hip. Unraveling the central mystery at play in The Callisto Protocol alongside him kept me rather engaged throughout.
The Callisto Protocol’s Presentation
The Callisto Protocol is absolutely gorgeous. One of the best-looking games of 2022 easily. Striking Distance Studios has done a tremendous job with Unreal Engine 4 here (more on that later). Everything from the motion capture to textures, to lighting, is quality. The award for best sweat in a video game definitely goes to The Callisto Protocol.
In all seriousness though, the game is majorly bolstered by its visuals. Black Iron Prison is wonderfully detailed, and the outdoor sequences are truly a sight to behold. The lighting and heavy use of particle effects in the air such as dust and smoke give the game an unsettling, eerie vibe. This is good because The Callisto Protocol isn’t overly scary. There are a few jump scares of course, but the dread largely comes from the environment and sound design.
The enemies in this game are disgustingly grotesque. They look awesome and are wonderfully animated as they sulk around the environment. Each enemy has unique player death animations that range from pulling Jacob’s jaw clean off, to stomping his skull to bits. They are gruesome, but I found myself intentionally dying a couple of times to each new enemy just to see the amount of detail put into them. I highly recommend it if you can stomach them. A nice little update came recently too that lets you skip them if you want.
Unfortunately, all of this comes at a price for the PC version. It being an Unreal Engine 4 game, it suffers from the occasional stutter, and I struggled to get the game to run consistently smooth with a 3080ti at 2560×1440 resolution and high settings. It looks and runs very well on PS5, although I struggle with which version to recommend as I don’t think a controller is the best way to play this game…
Gameplay
The Callisto Protocol is a survival horror game that has you scrounging for ammo at every turn, like any staple of the genre, but where it separates itself is in its competence as a melee-focused combat game. Jacob is almost immediately equipped with some form of melee weapon from your very first combat engagement. You start with a crude pipe but soon find yourself with a powerful stun baton that you can upgrade along your journey.
Melee combat is essential in The Callisto Protocol, and your ability to learn its mechanics is paramount to your enjoyment of the game. Central to its melee combat is the dodge system. When you engage an enemy you enter into a sort of soft lock-on system and when an enemy attacks you hold down a direction, left or right – it doesn’t matter, and Jacob will dodge the attack. When the enemy attacks again, you hold the opposite direction that you held the first time, and so on and so forth until your attacker finishes their combo and you can open up on them. Alternatively, you can move backward to block and take reduced damage. Once you gain access to a firearm, the end of your melee combo will stun the enemy and you can follow up with an auto-locked-on shot for extra damage.
Playing on the keyboard and mouse, this was relatively easy as holding “A” or “D” without pressing “W” or “S” really is simple. I found myself getting into a rhythm that was rather enjoyable. The camera is super tight into Jacob’s back and moves with good inertia that made fights feel frantic and intense, not to mention gruesome and gory. On a controller though, I found it far too easy to be holding the stick just ever so slightly at a diagonal which caused the dodge to not register. It only takes a few hits before Jacob is ripped to pieces, so this could quickly turn the game frustrating, especially at higher difficulties.
Combat Choices & Difficulty
Along your journey in The Callisto Protocol, you will come across various weaponry and gadgets. Chief among those is the GRP Glove. Found early in the game, the GRP Glove allows you to control gravity to pick up and throw objects and enemies from a distance. Combining this with your various firearms and stun baton is essential to survival in more intense battles.
Combat in The Callisto Protocol can be challenging. Getting overrun by 3 or more enemies is extremely difficult to come out of alive, especially if one or more of those enemies can attack you from range. I never found this to be overly frustrating, in fact, I enjoyed entering a combat encounter, scanning the environment to see what projectiles lay waiting for me to grab with my GRP, or what environmental hazards I could toss an enemy into. More often than not, using a combination of melee, GRP, and firearms was the key to my personal success.
That being said, The Callisto Protocol gives you options. It’s one of my favorite things about the game. There are upgrade stations scattered around Black Iron Prison that allow you to use your credits to upgrade your gear, 3D print new guns, buy ammo and health, and sell items you find Don’t like the shooting? Upgrade your stun baton and GRP so you can throw enemies into hazards and wail away at the stragglers. Don’t like the melee combat? Pump your credits into the GRP and your firearms to keep enemies at a distance.
Final Thoughts on The Callisto Protocol
I really enjoyed my time with The Callisto Protocol. It isn’t the second coming of Survival Horror, but it is another successful entry for fans of the genre. It’s wildly pretty to look at, the story kept me engaged through to the end, and I meshed with the combat systems. It won’t be for everyone though, and performance issues and the occasional frustrations from checkpointing mar what is otherwise a thrilling game.
