Do you remember a few years ago when most big games were spiritual successors to past hits? Mainly because the companies that owned said hits weren’t doing anything with the IPs in question. We learned quickly after going through the trenches with Yooka Laylee and seeing how far our once-good friend Mighty Number 9 has fallen. Maybe because we said we wanted it back, doesn’t mean it should come back. That’s a great Segway into my thoughts on Dead Space 4, I mean The Callisto Protocol. Whose timing comes with one major issue that hangs over it like a very loose Sword of Damocles? Well, after spending 10 hours to mainline this game, I can say this isn’t Dead Space. I can also say that doesn’t mean it was good.
You play as Transformers Army Man, I mean Jacob Lee, with some pretty jaw-dropping facial model details that mix perfectly with the lighting and atmosphere. You are thrown into a prison on the Jupiter moon of Callisto just as a “zombie” outbreak starts to take effect on the planet. It’s up to you to find out what’s happening and try to get off the planet. If the story sounds cliché, that’s because it very much is; the first introduction we get of Jacob’s character is him saying that this is the last job, which is a code word for this isn’t going to go well. He also has a crewmate that isn’t set up at all, but the game will do everything in its power to convince you that he was an emotional core in Jacob’s character.
So, if story is your thing, then you might be able to get something out of The Callisto Protocol; I was able to have fun predicting where all the usual suspects would pop up on the storyline; it even does the Dead Space tradition of having the last thing you see be a jump scare before smash cutting to credits. But the game does have good storytelling chops, just not the best writing team. Because the environments steal the show for me, the amount of story details in the setting alone is a feat that shouldn’t be ignored. One example had me finding a bloodied-up prison jumper and a trail of blood and bits; I followed the path and found the prisoner had mutated into a grotesque monster, and I had to put him down. These few moments of organic storytelling are where the game shines the brightest, that is, until you have to fight the monster, and it starts to fall apart quickly.
In Dead Space, the creature design helped give this avoiding nature to the player, like if you got too close to it, you would see your heart at the end of one of its sharp nails. Here the game is more focused on being something akin to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. Because the melee combat is hilariously broken at times and at others, intense as all hell, it works as follows, you attack with either the right bumper or trigger, then you move the left stick in the direction you want to avoid the attack, and that’s it. In my opinion, this choice of making melee more focused than ranged kills the tension. Because that fear is gone when you can walk up to a mutated thing and start spamming the right trigger like no tomorrow and turn the breathing beast into a puddle once you learn that the game can feel like a breeze if you know which enemies to use which exploits with, that is until the late game when the game spikes up the difficulty with no warning. This is where the homage to late 2000s horror controls starts to become a frustration rather than a nostalgic novelty. Because when they are asking me to take down two instant kill giants at the same time while also having to avoid crawling bomb monsters, I start to lose being scared and start to get mad at the game design.
I should note I played this on Xbox Series X because I have seen PC footage of the game, and while, at times, the game did appear to be a little choppy even after I turned on Performance Mode. It never got to that level of unplayable for me, that is, until the final boss, where it hard crashed to Home three times at the exact same spot; if I didn’t already know how to cheese the final boss, I would have ended it there due to the amount anger boiling in me from that one section alone. So, in the end, The Callisto Protocol was a big disappointment coming from a long-time Dead Space fan, but the thing is, I’m not surprised.
To capture that lightning-in-a-bottle terror that was the original Dead Space would be hard on its own, but to set out to attempt to is what happened here. I do hope that this is successful enough for Krafton to greenlight a sequel because if you look past all of the issues and fat, there is a really good survival horror game in there, something a sequel might be able to show us one day. But as it stands right now, don’t bother with this one.
Score: 5 out of 10
Reviewed on Xbox Series X