On December 2, The Callisto Protocol, a new game by Glen Scotfield, the creator of Dead Space, was released on PC and consoles. Many players saw Callisto as the spiritual successor to the DS, and the commercials successfully created the illusion that this would actually be the case. However, the release of the game put everything in its place: The Callisto Protocol is not a survival horror in a dangerous environment at all. And no, it's not horror at all. The game turned out to be, rather, a sci-fi thriller, the authors of which offer players to squeeze the maximum out of the minimum available resources. Kanobu editor Alexey Egorov tells what the developers from Friv5Online Studios ended up with.
The events of Callisto take place in the distant future. The year is 2320, people have long ago colonized the satellites of Jupiter and are building cities there with might and main. The main character, Jacob Lee, is an ordinary space trucker who, along with his partner, signed up for a job for the United Jupiter Company (UCC): to deliver cargo from Europe to Callisto and back (the game explains that the hero had at least several such flights). However, the next flight does not go according to plan: terrorists enter the ship, it falls, and the Black Tin prison staff, who arrived in time to save the hero from a cold death, still decides to throw him behind bars. Yes, just in case.
I will say right away: there will be no serious plot twists in the story, almost everything can be guessed immediately, as the hero is dragged to the "Black Tin". The antagonist manifests himself almost immediately, moreover, he immediately sets out his villainous plan (alegorically, of course). It will be very difficult not to guess how it will all end.
The story in Callisto turned out to be completely straightforward and simple, and the ending came out more crumpled. Everything that relates to the plot (minus the direction), Striking Distance generally turned out to be very average. The middle of the game “sags” very much, even a trip through the ruins of the first colony on the planet does not help, and the last two hours, on the contrary, literally shower the player with revelations, plot twists and information about the world around them. In general, information that the player himself guessed a couple of hours ago.
Notes, which are usually designed to deepen the world of the game, do not help either. In The Callisto Protocol, all audio files contain two or three sentences - sometimes it takes longer to climb into the inventory for them than to listen. Boredom, that's all.
Briefly about what is happening here, you can write something like this: the main character, who is literally left without everything, is forced to go through fire, water and copper pipes, having exterminated more than one hundred bloodthirsty biophage mutants during his journey. And all in order to survive on the inhospitable moon of Jupiter.
First of all, it is worth remembering one important thing. The Callisto Protocol is not horror in the usual sense. Yes, the game will regularly scare you, throwing up tense moments and screamers (sometimes even successful ones), but all the atmosphere of horror and hopelessness disappears in the first couple of hours. Then you, along with the hero, will prevail, and it is around this that all your thoughts will revolve.
At the heart of "Callisto" is the following idea: you are limited in everything. You have a weapon, but there is almost always little ammo for it. You have a gauntlet that allows you to throw opponents into walls, but it will be discharged "to zero" quite often. You can effectively fight with a police shock baton in close combat, but at the same time, the number of hits in your combination is severely limited (and Jacob's health is only enough for a couple of enemy attacks). And it is around this game that offers to dance. What is closer to you - to fight with enemies, saving everything you have as much as possible, or to squander all the supplies you find at the slightest danger? Beat enemies from afar (but for a long time), spending invaluable resources, or take a chance and climb straight into the jaws of the devil, risking missing heads?
You need to get used to the combat system of the game, no jokes here. At first it may seem that it is all tied to the melee system, and you can only do something with a club. No, it's not, although the opening segments literally tell you so.
The situation will change slightly with the receipt of the first firearm. The hero will learn not only to crush skulls and break arms and legs, but also to shoot enemies, discouraging them from any desire to climb and get to know each other better. Combat is changing - where the hero used to make three strokes and was forced to go on the defensive, dodging, an option for maximum aggression appears, where the combination continues with a couple of shots from a pistol. And then the game gives you a kinetic gauntlet that allows you to throw enemies and objects, and then you have a tactical element. Throw the most dangerous enemy away (ideally, of course, on spikes or into the abyss), knock out the teeth of the nearest one, shoot the monster creeping up from the back. Once you get used to it, you can do it in seconds.
Some players generally get a natural " saber dance " - a blow, a shot, a glove, all this is combined with incredible speed, because of which the enemies do not get a single chance.
At a certain point, enemies will learn to mutate right during the fight, and at that very moment it may seem to you that melee weapons have become useless. This is not at all the case: it is easier to bring the enemy to mutation just by hitting a stupid head with a club, and only then you should drive several shots from a pistol or a shotgun into his tentacles. Moreover, it is advisable not to use the system of automatic weapon combos - they are certainly useful, and without them, hitting enemies rushing back and forth can seem like torture, but when you have to shoot tentacles, this system only gets in the way.
Between encounters, Jacob will have to explore Tinplate and the prison environment, as well as interact with a few living people - these episodes also turned out to be quite good. The game is well staged, the characters played by live actors turned out to be quite good (even though they are very poorly revealed, but I already spoke about the weak plot), and everything that happens around is worth attention.
The prison on Callisto turned out to be a colorful place in general (even if it doesn’t feel like it’s in the yard of the distant future). The authors do not hesitate to take the player to completely different places, each time offering something new. Here's a burning prison block, but a destroyed medical laboratory. Here we have a mandatory level in the sewers (the authors of Serious Sam 2, who joked back in 2005 about the fact that there are no shooting games without such levels, probably regret what was said for a long time), and here you are let out for a walk in the "fresh air" only to then drive into the hopeless catacombs. The change of scenery in general will be quite frequent, and this is only to the advantage of the game.
If you take out the extremely insipid plot, then Callisto will still have a whole bunch of different-sized problems. Take level design, for example.
Even if you enjoy the combat system and feel the local atmosphere, you won’t be able to avoid criticizing one particular element with all your desire. This, of course, is about various "bottlenecks", such as air ducts, cracks in the wall and other places where the hero moves slowly and carefully. Of course, the technique is hackneyed and exists in every second game, but The Callisto Protocol uses it literally at every turn.
In this regard, the first two or three hours generally look like a mockery. The hero got out of the ventilation? Let him crawl into a narrow hole between two walls! And then let him go down the stairs. And, if this seemed not enough to you, then after such a segment, a fight with enemies will definitely await you, during which death will force you to do this tedious route again. Yes, control points are also one of the problematic things, because they are scattered very strangely, if not “crookedly”. By the way, you won’t be able to skip cutscenes either - in case of death, if you please, not only crawl along the hundredth ventilation, but also watch the same screensaver again and again.
The prize for the "worst level in the game" goes to the dungeon, which is inhabited by blind mutants. They don’t see a hero, and just wander around, offering to quietly eliminate them with a knife in the back. It seems to be an obvious attempt to slightly “slow down” the pace of the game, to throw in something new, but crawling after these monsters on all fours is so tiring that you start grinding your teeth already on the third or fourth hall with these creatures. And the segment with them is incredibly long!
The developers from Striking Distance and the bosses failed. In fact, there are only two of them for the whole game, but you have to fight with them six times. Four times your opponent will be a huge two-headed mutant, the battle with which is frankly exhausting. It is incredibly "dense", kills the hero with one hit, and all that remains for you is to constantly dodge, run back and try to knock him down, spending all the ammo you have.
The Callisto Protocol is merciless in this regard: after the first two-headed, it will take about half an hour before you meet with the second (good luck to accumulate ammo by then), then you will receive an “intermediate” second boss, half an hour after which the third two-headed will follow. Well, the battle with the fourth turned out to be torture for me: not only did smaller opponents interfere in the battle itself, but also the cartridges ran out in the first “phase” of the big man. In the end, I literally killed the creature with a wastebasket, which I diligently threw at his head for two minutes with the help of a kinetic glove. It ended up being funny, but at the time I wasn't laughing at all.
And here the problem is not even that the authors use the same boss four times, but that he is boring. It's just a fat punching bag that takes away your hard-earned ammo and can kill you in one hit if you're a little slow. Fascinatingly? Not to life!
I tried not to mention the previous Scotfield sci-fi thriller in the text just to explain for the game in isolation from the ideological predecessor. However, I am sure that many of you have a question from the category “well, what if you just put them side by side and compare?”. Well, let's see:
Callisto is a completely linear action game with no map and minimal backtracking. In Dead Space , the opposite is true - the game had extensive maps and a fairly convenient guide, but there was also enough running around already explored locations.
Completely different approach to the combat system. "Strategic dismemberment" from "Dead Space", when you had to cut off limbs from enemies with surgical precision, simply does not work in Callisto. Even if you deprive the “spitter” of his head, he will still fill you with acid through the neck stump. And no, shooting at tentacles, cutting off the ability of enemies to get stronger, is not very close to Dead Space.
In Dead Space, the atmosphere was much more tense, although in general the techniques of the shooting games are similar. Flashing lights in the corridors, vague silhouettes and shadows, attacks from unexpected places (from the back or from the ceiling), gloomy and bone-chilling soundtrack (great in both shooting games). But the creation of EA Redwood Shores used its arsenal much better. As a result, both shooting games are kept in suspense, but only one scares.
The Callisto Protocol came out as a more aggressive game than Dead Space. The combat system here is much faster and "angrier": watching the brutal animations of the death of opponents in Callisto is interesting both for the first hour of the game and after another eight.
Dead Space "works out" its sci-fi setting many times better than The Callisto Protocol. The game of 2008 is very difficult to imagine in a different setting, but the Striking Distance project could easily become a new part of Resident Evil . Replace the colony on Jupiter's moon with a remote city, and the spaceship with a truck, and voila.
Dead Space had a much more creative approach to weapons - Isaac used not only weapons, but also various engineering and mining devices as weapons. In Callisto, the arsenal is not only incredibly poor - one club and five firearms - but also boring. Two pistols, two shotguns, one rifle - have you fallen asleep there yet, reading these lines?
In short, the shooting games turned out to be completely different. Somewhere The Callisto Protocol wins (in terms of cruelty, general staging and visuals), somewhere Dead Space pulls out the palm (atmosphere, location design and approach to creating certain situations). To say unequivocally that one game is better than another without question will not come out with all the desire: they are too different, even if there are enough conditionally common elements.
Despite not the most successful start (on the day of the premiere, the game's rating on Steam fell to 22% approval), The Callisto Protocol is gradually getting back on its feet. The reviews on Steam are no longer as bad as they were on release, and the authors are hard at work on patches and improvements for both PC and consoles (because there are enough problems in all versions of the game). And the reviews of critics and players are still mostly positive.
The key problem of the game is that it was promoted completely wrong. Tell Scotfield and his team right away that we are waiting for a linear sci-fi action movie about shooting space undead, and not an uncomfortable and gloomy horror, then the public's expectations would be completely different. Unfortunately, advertising (and the developers' statements ) has already done its dirty deed, and now the question is rather whether the combat system will come in for most of the players, or scare them away. Because the talk about it is extremely polar.
As for me, I rather liked The Callisto Protocol than not. This is a very atmospheric action game with brutal battles, excellent visuals and incredible sound work. No doubt, I would be much happier if the game were closer to Dead Space, but even the current result suits me quite well. Albeit not without serious reservations.
PS The game has been translated into Russian, and the authors were not too lazy even to localize signs and holographic inscriptions. Unfortunately, sometimes the translation lacks grammar (pearls like “food tunnels” or “tram station” are found everywhere), and in some places there are no subtitles at all, both in plot points and when listening to audio recordings. A trifle, but unpleasant.