I was expecting it to be another dead void, but it wasn’t.
You can’t talk about the Callisto Accords without talking about Dead Space. After the “Dead Space” series ended, many games tried to restore its cold and lonely American space horror atmosphere. Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s Callisto Protocol, released on December 2, is undoubtedly the most anticipated and the closest thing to success.
In my gaming experience, “The Callisto Protocol” not only perfectly presents a closed, cold space industrial giant building full of horrible creatures infected by alien viruses, but also has the technology of 4A games. Under the blessing, the finely modeled severed limbs, internal organs and plasma were spread in every corner of the black steel prison.
Regrettably, corresponding to the unparalleled blood and atmosphere, there are also prominent design flaws in the Callisto Protocol. Poor optimization, flat story, and lack of depth in the combat system and level design are destined to make this blood-red space thriller a bold and fresh attempt, but it cannot be said to be an excellent work that can stand on its own.
The game begins with the protagonist Jacob being imprisoned in the black steel prison with the highest security level on Callisto after the transport ship he was driving crashed. A large-scale riot broke out in the prison afterwards, and the prisoners were all turned into terrifying and ferocious beasts due to an unknown deadly virus. Players need to control Jacob to fight monsters in cold and dark steel facilities one after another, fight a bloody path, and escape from Callisto.
Development TeamStriking Distance
Studios has done an impeccable job of shaping the atmosphere. SDS almost perfectly arranges all the scaring elements needed in a successful sci-fi horror game: loud alarm bells, mechanical electronic sounds, survivors’ wailing and facility explosion flames; or a silent dark laboratory , the monster’s sticky grunts from time to time, and the mysterious whispers that linger in my ears all the time.
The scariest thing is that you may have just been in a large-scale prison break scene that is still terrified and panicked by the high-decibel and high-brightness atmosphere; the back foot will immediately step into a power-off laboratory that has a huge contrast with the first five minutes of game experience , accompanied by the ticking blood and the popping electric sparks, pray for any sound and light that can bring you a sense of security. This kind of huge contrast oozes panic, pulls people’s uneasiness to the highest level, and maintains it at a peak.
In the middle and late stages of the game, when the player is almost desensitized to such an environment, the game cleverly changes the scene to the greenhouse and planetary surface with natural scenes. When more than a dozen lifeless big ice lumps loomed in the snowstorm, it was more stressful than jailbreak, with cold hands and feet.
Callisto Protocol was claimed to be a 4A game in the announcement stage, and the actual screen performance is indeed worthy of this title. Digital Foundry of Shumao Society also praised it as “the best evolution version of Unreal 4 game”.
The modeling of the protagonist Jacob can really be described by the stalk of “every hair can be seen clearly”
Lighting and particle systems also add to the thrill of the game. The dense fog that cannot be penetrated by lighting, the dim mine lamp half blocked by parasitic spores, the corpse with its jaw torn off under the emergency strobe red light…you always need to worry about whether there will be a monster with the “highest painting in history” hidden in the distance The scary zombie with the reputation of “Quality” is ready to use its photo-level face at the scene of a car accident to get in touch with you intimately.
In contrast to the extreme graphics, the monster design of the game is too conservative. Most of the monsters in the game still do not have a transcendent human form, and most of the attack modes are Wang Baquan.
The combat system of the game is quite refreshing, highly emphasizing the importance of melee and dodge, you can dodge left and right and melee to cause damage, and then use firearms to shoot hard and straight to continue the combo. But in the middle and late stages of the game, the pace of the game slowed down, and monsters piled up. The relatively scraping damage of firearms almost forced players to choose dodge, melee, and rapid shooting, which were relatively repetitive.
There’s a gravity rig called GRP that grabs monsters and parts of objects and projects them, and it’s hard not to be reminiscent of a similar mechanic in Dead Space. But in Callisto Protocol, all GRP can do most of the time is catch monsters and throw them at walls of spikes that are everywhere and completely unreasonable. Moreover, the frequency of these spike walls is a bit too high and too deliberate. Sometimes it even feels more like because some interesting interactive places have not been finished, and the vacant places have to be topped with them first.
The impact of hardware sacrifices brought about by excellent picture quality on the game experience cannot be bypassed. On the first day of the game’s release, it received “mostly bad reviews” on Steam due to optimization issues. Even with Sony’s technical support, the PS5 version, which claims to be the most stable, will suddenly drop frames during battles in some large-scale scenes. At the end of the game, whenever I saw several infected people staggering towards me, my first reaction was not panic, but “X! It’s about to start getting stuck again”. However, SDS has urgently released a patch update for the optimization problem, and Steam’s evaluation has also picked up to “mixed praise and criticism”, and this problem may be further improved in the future.
For fans of sci-fi horror games, Callisto Protocol is a wonderful, gory sci-fi horror game. The compact process and the extreme picture in the early ten hours are worth the price of admission. However, compared to Dead Space, something was missing.
I was thinking about this question while playing Callisto Protocol, and then I remembered an interview ArsTechnica did with Glen, the co-producer of both games. There is a famous tentacle monster in “Dead Space”, which was so troublesome to make that it was almost cut off, but it was saved by the production staff in the end. In order to make this tentacle monster, the game engine has made a lot of changes, and even many parts that have been done have to be done again. In the Callisto Agreement, many places that make people feel that they are “almost breathless” may lack a little bit of this kind of courage to make or break. Of course, that’s another topic.
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