izigame.me

You know I was one of those freaks that liked the base game of “The Callisto Protocol”. I thought it was fun, and while it had flaws, I still thought it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be, it became a game that fell prey to the cycle of overhyping things only to then get a game that couldn’t possibly meet people’s expectations; it was flawed, sure, but it wasn’t the horrible game that a lot of people made it out to be, I feel.
This DLC though? If in the base game you could get a sense of an attempt when it came to the developer’s part, as in an actual intention for making a great game, just not one where every decision worked out; here you get a sense of the opposite, not only are a lot of the elements not working out, it also seems as if the developers have given up.
The audio logs that you find do nothing in telling you anything substantial, the story is absurd, even more so than it was in the base game, the pacing is horrible, the encounters are terrible; they attempted to balance the difficulty of the game by swarming you with numerous enemies given the DLC takes place after the story, so you’ll get to keep your weapons and upgrades from your main game’s playthrough, but the developer’s attempt at balancing this out is obtuse to put it kindly.
Not only are the enemies much more numerous this time around, but you’re also getting pinned against them in a series of scenarios that don’t function properly for the already clunky combat the game has; at times you’ll be placed in constricted corridors and tight spaces, making the fights a unintelligible mess, in other cases you’ll get placed in extremely dark enviroments, making it impossible to see most of the enemies.
And all of that from before is not even the biggest issue; the level design in this DLC is horrific. They attempted to do a similar style to the Souls games or the newest Dead Space, where the corridors and levels are interconnected, something that seems very simple, but in reality, you have to really know how to design such a thing in order for it to work, otherwise you’re left with an overtly complex and unintuitive level design that doesn’t feel organic to explore but one that -instead-, confuses the crap out of the player. In turn, I was constantly getting lost and had to backtrack a lot of the times, it wasn’t fun, nor it was rewarding for me to go out an explore; for the most part exploring the levels in this DLC involved me getting audio logs, that like I’ve mentioned before, don’t contribute or say anything really, most of them make obvious observations like “if this thing spreads it will be an apocalypse”, or “I promise myself I wouldn’t betray my principles”. I am paraphrasing, but generally that’s what these new audio logs boil down into.
Overall, I hated my experience with this DLC, I didn’t even finish it; I got to a part where I was in a sewer surrounded by enemies, I got to beat the enemies which was a gruelling experience because I couldn’t see shit, and then proceeded to backtrack all the way from where I came, because the level design is that freaking bad. I called it quits then.
I just can’t believe they felled for the criticisms and incorporated most of the critique towards the game in the worst way possible. If someone is critical of your creation, you’re supposed to learn from what they’re being critical about, question if what they mention is true or not, and if it is, then how will you improve upon it; what you don’t do is give up, try to cash in, in a hail mary attempt at getting the last bucks you can milk out of your game, and in turn stop improving on yourself and what you create.
They did add the option to auto play the audio logs when playing, something that happens automatically now with no option to enable or disable them, it’s good, but I wish it was a tad bit better. Is about everything good that I can say about this darn DLC.