I keep thinking about this game and how it made me feel, so I’m going to drop a review of it even though I’m not a gamer who plays. SPOILERS AHEAD so if you don’t want to read about the ending of this game, please feel free to skip this post.
Anyone who knows me knows my favorite games, tied for first (I’m being honest with myself) are Dead Space and BioShock. When Dead Space first came out, I was blown away by the design, the gameplay, the story, all of it just settled into my brain and was kind of the beginning of my love of science fiction. I’ve always liked science fiction, but Dead Space opened my brain up to the unsettling aspects of the unknown dangers in space. I know there are films and stories older than Dead Space, but I hadn’t taken part in those yet. Aside from Halo, I hadn’t really encountered that uneasy feeling of something ahead I couldn’t see, but knew it would be a problem. When the popcorn balls of Flood came swarming out of a hold in the first Halo game, that moment kind of kicked the part of my brain that likes the spooky space stuff into gear.
I begin with Dead Space because throughout the gameplay I watched of Callisto Protocol, I kept comparing it to Dead Space. They are incredibly similar in design and story. There are certainly different visuals and gameplay itself is different, but I think both games have elements that make them their own. I’ll start with the similarities:
- Location has encountered unknown virus or disease taking over
- Main character is the ‘go-fer’
- Main character has a job unrelated to the primary functions people keep asking him to “fix” or “take care of”
- Limbs seem to be the thing to remove in order to kill beasties faster
- Cool guns/weapons
- Figure of authority who is the cause of problems/doesn’t do anything to stop problems from spreading
- Ambiguous ending (for main campaign play. Dead Space had two more games after, and Callisto Protocol had DLC that we’ll get into later)
The things Callisto did well:
- World design
- large prison moon that expanded across the entirety of the location. The depth of the prison is revealed to have an older, failed settlement underneath the initial location. There are several sequences of falling that help showcase the absolute behemoth of a world Callisto is.
- Weapons
- I thought it was ridiculously cool that you could 3D print your guns/upgrades. There was the standard “credits for upgrades” stuff throughout, but I enjoyed the animation for the printing of the upgrades every time it happened. The boom stick made such a satisfying sound when it hit enemies. That kind of small detail was one of my favorite parts of the whole game.
- Visuals in general
- The colors, lighting, textures, etc all played a part in making it an immersive environment. The design of the enemies (I called them gooey dudes and freezy boys depending on location) is gross enough to be what I’d consider a standard of the genre, but interesting enough to be distinguishable from other games. A caveat is the gooey dudes were a little similar to the clickers from Last of Us, but that’s a digression. When fighting on the surface of the moon, everything kind of had this grayscale effect to it that was really, really cool, and enemies kind of blended in if they weren’t frozen in place.
- Sound design
- Not only was the music a legit part of the environment, but the creaks and rumbles and splashes were all insanely fun. I started my watch-through not wearing headphones but quickly put them on because I couldn’t hear what Jacob (main character) was saying. The sound is binaural and wowzers. The anxiety is heightened when you can hear something ahead but you can’t see it. The voices of the security bots is also intensified when it sounds like they’re right next to you as you’re being stealthy.
- Enemies
- Speaking of the security bots, haha. As the location is a prison on a moon, the elements of security would necessitate bots of some kind. These bots are not the standard floating boxes. These bots are completely badass.
What enhances the security bots later is a misguided scientist’s attempt to combine biology with tech and all she gets is this monstrous metal gloopy being bent on killing everything. The reveal of these enemies is pretty cool because there’s the shiny metal, but also the muscle mass and sinew of mammalian biology.
What Callisto Protocol failed for me:
- Main character is a bit boring
- Jacob is a pilot, a courier. He crash lands on Callisto while delivering and is kept as a prisoner because he “knows too much.” I think this game fell into the trap of “meet here and we’ll decide what to do next” only to keep using that mechanic to propel the game forward. As Jacob, we do a lot of running to places to fix things I’m not sure a pilot would necessarily have the skill required to fix. There are some moments where the characters acknowledge this lack of skill, but he still manages to fix the things just fine. Josh Duhamel as the VA for Jacob was a solid choice, though.
- Gameplay is repetitive
- Not only do you have to keep meeting people only to have to meet them later on a different level for a different task, there’s a lot of repetition in those tasks. Changing a fuse to open a door is a pretty standard sci-fi horror task, but it seemed like there were very few doors we didn’t need to change a fuse for, or he had to cut the wires for something to open. The stealth kill animation is also very similar to Joel’s in Last of Us. I know there are going to be similarities, but even to the way the main character lays the victim down feels a little recycled.
- Story doesn’t have much cohesion
- This is strictly for main campaign gameplay. Once Jacob saves the life of a resistance member (Dani) from the virus, he sends her off in an escape pod. They’ve shared their memories so she has his knowledge of the situation, and he has hers of why she’s a resistance member. He then runs off toward the exploding prison like the hero he is. There is no explanation that makes sense to why Jacob “knows too much.” It’s revealed he has some kind of dementia, or amnesia, but there’s no explanation for that either. Supposedly this missing information is passed to Dani, but the player never gets that conclusion. For all we know based on the story presented, Jacob is just the victim of corrupt prison wardens and human security and he doesn’t actually know anything.
- DLC felt like an insult
- The main campaign takes about seven hours to complete. The DLC adds almost another three. Essentially 9 hours of total gameplay. It’s full of the whole “we need to do this before we can do that! Meet me here and I’ll open the door for you!” tactic, and that grows incredibly tiresome after a few hours. The continuation of that for the DLC is a disappointment because we don’t get to have proper exploration of the world or story.
- SPOILER: (the DLC) it was all just in his head. The reveal at the end of the DLC that this was all a “could have been/might have been” as he’s dying in the scientist’s lab is such a slap to the face. When Jacob watches Dani fly off in the escape pod, he’s blown up. The prison doctor/scientist finds him and hooks him up to her machines. All of the running around he does in the DLC is just a dream he conjures while being kept alive so his memories can transfer. In the scheme of storytelling, this is such a cheap way to end a story you didn’t even bother to fill out in the first place. There’s no explanation for pretty much anything, and we’re left to wonder why we played the game so long if it wasn’t going to give us any conclusion.
- ANOTHER SPOILER: At the very end, Josh Duhamel’s voice comes out of Jacob and he’s shouting that “hey, it’s me, Josh! I’m not dead! Hey!” This would have been fun to me if I hadn’t just witnessed it all being a dream. It felt like the producers laughing as they turned the lights off and left me in the dark as I asked why.
All of the negatives I’ve listed do not detract from the fact I loved this game up till the end. The ending left me bitter and annoyed, but everything else was fantastic. There are similarities to Dead Space, yes, but I think overall Callisto is its own game and I think if we can forgive a shit ending, we can appreciate the game that got us to that shit ending. The visuals, especially the lighting with the sort of neon colors against the darkness of a failing environment, were so cool. Sound design was also amazing to me.
I think I originally gave this game a 6/10 because of the ending, but I feel like that’s harsh considering how much fun I had until that point. I will give this an 8/10.
salisbury.fake 