need to know
what is that? Third-person survival horror from a Dead Space veteran.
Expected payment: $59.99 / £49.99
Release date: December 2, 2022
Developer: Range distance
the publisher: Crafton
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official site (opens in new tab)
The Callisto Protocol, like all good prison movies, opens with an intolerable mood of doom. Workingman pilot Jacoby crash-landed on Callisto’s Dead Moon after his cargo ship was boarded by a notorious terrorist group. Someone else has died a strange and horrific death during the crash, and we have been given ample opportunity to study this misfortune. The long awaited becomes clear. But soon the prison is engulfed in a mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into crazed mutants.
These events effectively cascade over the first 30 minutes. What better way to set the tone of a relentlessly brutal survival horror game than the sudden intrusion of disaster, injustice, and a walking bucket of pus? Not subtle about. Somewhat counterintuitively, fear is strangely comfortable for those of us who are players of this decidedly nasty horror game. You are in serious trouble and need to get out of it. Perhaps we’ll learn a little bit about that terrorist group, and inevitably some subplots will creep in and meet the characters that are with us, but Callisto’s protocol is too much to solidify the horror of that setting. Don’t waste your time. Now he walks almost straight for 15 hours and just cuts the road.
It’s no joke to say that The Callisto Protocol is a comfortable video game, but it’s at the far end of the same axis occupied by Dragon Quest, for example. Familiarity is comfort, and the Callisto Protocol is consistently a big-budget joyride. The indie-horror scenes cover powerful psychological ills (see Visage, Signalis) and are also home to grindhouse schlock (see Murder House and countless of his PS1-era spooky throwbacks). . In the Resident Evil sense, and most notably Dead Space sense, big-budget horror games are about roaming moody hallways and spouting shit on a regular basis.
horror in the hallway
Boy, does Callisto Protocol have creepy hallways. A claustrophobic engine room with erupting burst valves, access holes, maintenance rooms, old steel, reverberating vents, flickering holographic terminals, underground crawlspaces filled with purulent slimy growths. There’s a lot of that stuff in the middle and late hours as well, but some areas get a touch wider and by the end of the game there are some surprising departures from the “dark dark corridor” format. Are you Space 4? Or is it Dead Space 3, which many think it should have been? Mostly both.
These environments are the most obvious sources of the odd comforts I mentioned. Because the feeling of playing Callisto Protocol at that start time is very similar to the feeling of playing Dead Space. You’ve got the same pristine diegetic user interface, the same over-the-shoulder controls for a heavy, stocky man, and the same freedom to tread a corpse into a pool of chewed pudding. Glen Schofield, who directed Space, he recreated that game’s “strong yet very fragile” balanced game.
Boy, does this lunar colony have an amazing amount of wall-mounted spikes.
We don’t blame Scofield for going back to being official. I loved how Lee has a rotating circle of children’s toy tractors. No matter how weak the enemy is, it will never succeed in a melee stunlock, requiring the use of a somewhat awkward left/right evasion system. Does he move with the burly grace of a televised fast bowler in slow motion? Why does he keep putting away his baton and why does he slowly take it out? This is because there is no
Callisto Protocol takes a rhythmic approach to hand-to-hand combat, but in the 15 hours I’ve been playing with the controller, I’ve never been able to effectively nail the timing of a seemingly simple dodge system. Perhaps I’m just bad at it, but in the heat of the moment, especially when dealing with multiple enemies, I often resorted to panic shooting. It’s satisfyingly vicious, especially when split up by close-range shotgun rounds.
Gravity Crush
On the back of Lee’s head is a green bar that indicates health and a blue bar that indicates if the “GRP” is overheating. GRP is The Callisto Protocol’s answer to Control’s levitation, or Half-Life 2’s gravity guns, and it’s a lot of fun. In a game full of spongy bad guys, this weapon allows you to pick most of them up and throw them off a platform into a rift, or more often into a wall-mounted spike. has a surprising amount of wall-mounted spikes. Alternatively, you can pick up nearby explosives and throw them at your enemies. This is less fun, but more sensible because picking up objects consumes less energy than floating mutants.
The addition of a “remove enemy” button to this survival horror is disorienting at first, but the Callisto Protocol gradually makes up for it. After receiving the GRP, I forgot I had it for a while. He continued to beat bad guys with his baton. Overwhelmed by one particular encounter, I turned to his GRP. that’s right. It turned out to be far more expedient to simply pick up the bastards and let them die. After learning to plunge into and turn into a weapon in every combat situation that warned of environmental hazards, this approach to combat was successful.
The Callisto Protocol’s over-the-top approach to gore is neither terribly interesting nor shocking.
GRP energy is finite, but something you desperately wanted for resources on medium difficulty, like stockpiling ammo for Callisto’s five ranged weapons (all standard fare and with a strong upgrade path) there is no. I actually turned to selling ammo and the occasional health to level up my abilities on a regular 3D printer workstation. As soon as I realized how useful GRP can be, I turned my attention to his GRP, but ultimately felt that I should invest more in regular weapons as well. However, you won’t be able to fill all upgrade paths in one playthrough, so it’s worth investing early in your preferred method of dying.
stupid jib
performance
I’m used to having to decide between using ray tracing and adding 40 frames per second. I usually use fps. Same with The Callisto Protocol. On the 3080 it ran below 60 fps with ray tracing on and jumped to around 100 with it off. Setting FSR 2.0 to performance mode gave an additional 3.5 fps increase, and tweaking other settings made no noticeable difference. Definitely some stutters, especially when loading new areas, or when camera control is taken and returned either side of the Callisto Protocol-filled cutscenes and certain pre-canned animations There was. But the face looks really nice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such incredible sweat on a video game character.
Mutants can be chopped limb by limb, and as a way to keep the carnage fresh rather than a matter of tactical accuracy, even a spike can cause limbs to move just by throwing them, as GRP can be so powerful. lose. flight. I didn’t find warts, veins, and saliva-rich villains to be particularly terrifying just because I’ve played a lot of horror games with enemies like these, but a few abominable exceptions There are predators. It’s not the appearance of these more terrifying mutants that poses the threat, but how they move through the environment. There is also the unprecedented threat of being transformed into a thing.
Checkpoints are generous enough that, aside from a few prickly areas, encounters rarely repeat themselves until very late in the game when the difficulty ramps up dramatically. I had a problem with placement. He would often spend five minutes selling loot or upgrading weapons at his workstation.
The second half died quite a bit, but at least the new death scene was a nasty novelty. These are naturally repetitive and some hold up mid-to-late game, but there are many, and most are surprisingly bad.The Callisto Protocol’s over-the-top approach to gore is very interesting Nothing or shocking. It works. But again, in a terribly comforting and familiar way.
This is a roller coaster video game. It’s full of movie video game cliches. Yes, navigate through a crumbling structure that begins to collapse when crossed. Yes, he needs to find 3 breakers in 3 dangerous locations and turn on the generator. Yes, you have to survive for a certain amount of time trapped in a claustrophobic space overrun by bad guys. And unsurprisingly, there’s more to what’s going on than Plessis in the story above suggests. Singing to a crowd, albeit in a tall studio. And we, most of us, sing back, “Yes, you can, keep on going.”
Much like Hideo Kojima wanted with Silent Hill, most of me would like the blockbuster horror game to go a little off track. It’s hard to blame The Callisto Protocol for becoming, or GRPing into rows of wall-mounted spikes. , or Wario Dragon Quest.
