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Much like Dead Space 3, this game makes me wish Steam had an inbetween to "yes" and "no" recommendations. Callisto Protocol isn't a "so bad dont play under any circumstances" game, but it's also not one I'd say "yes by all means it's a must play for horror fans", at least not at full price.
For context for the review, I beat the game in a little over 11 hours, playing on Maximum Security (hard mode). My PC specs are a Ryzen 5 5600x CPU, RTX 3060TI GPU, 32GB of Ram, with the game installed on a m2 SSD and played at 1080p on DX11 with a mix of medium and high graphics.

The Good

The game looks and sounds gorgeous. Character models are up there with some of the greats of modern AAA. Sound design is pretty good as to be expected by these devs, Maybe not on par with others like the RE2 Remake but still fairly effective especially in a few parts where you're fighting enemies you can't see very well. Lighting is also phenomenal as to be expected, though perhaps a bit too dark in some places.
Combat is fun. I know the combat is a sore spot for a lot of people with this game and I get why, but I thought it was fine despite it's simplicity. Once you get the hang of the dodge timing it's incredibly powerful and has room for some additional depth like Perfect Dodges that slow down time to guarantee counter attacks even against multihit combos, using your GRP and melee intertwined to make short work of enemies, and the guns and melee all feel impactful. Some of the weapon upgrades also have fun mechanics though admittedly I didn't play around with too many of these as those upgrades tend to be super expensive.
A lot of really fun enemy encounters in the early-mid game portions. They're setup very intentionally so that smart play and use of GRP and stealth can get you through scary situations without burning through your resources. Plus it's always fun to group up a bunch of enemies near spikes on a wall, do a heavy melee attack and send them all careening into the spike for free kills.
Maximum Security feels appropriately balanced. You die extremely quickly, but enemies don't feel too spongey for the difficulty, they'll die really quickly once you get the hang of the combat. Reminds me of Zealot from Dead Space 2 in that way, it feels properly balanced even if bosses can be a slog at times.

The Mehs

Enemy variety is a bit on the lacking side. You have basic melee and ranged units for most of the game, later on you'll get exploders, there's a few sections with invisible four legged enemies, and for one section of the game there's blind enemies that are very vulnerable to stealth kills. Later on the melee units get enhanced variants but unlike Dead Space where it'd be a mix of basic and enhanced to try and get you to prioritize your targets basically every melee enemy can become enhanced.
Story and lore are very by the numbers for a sci-fi horror property. If you've played Dead Space or watched things like The Thing or Event Horizon you can probably figure out what a lot of plot points are going to be way before they happen. The overall cast didn't feel as interesting or well thought out as most horror game characters but that's honestly just a nitpick cus most horror games don't have very good plots to begin.
There's a lack of meaningful side areas to explore. The game never distinguishes which path is a side path and which one is the main path, and all too often going the main path will lock you out the side path with no way to go back. Most side paths usually don't hold too many resources or will throw enemies at you that still result in a net-negative on resources almost as if to discourage exploring side paths in a horror game for... some reason?
For as much as they were toting the death scenes in the pre-release, there's surprisingly not as much as I was expecting. Each enemy only has like, 2 different death scenes and with how quickly you can die especially on max security you'll tire of them pretty quickly. It's a good thing you can pause during the death animation and return to checkpoint that way and skip the animation as a whole.

The Bad

The game falls off hard in the last third. While there were a lot of fun encounters in the first 2/3rds, the last 2 chapters it becomes clear the devs got really lazy. They reuse the same miniboss 4 times in the span of like 2 hours, in one case literally 2 encounters after the previous fight. The last boss fight also sucked but horror game bosses are generally not very good in general so that wasn't too big of a surprise.
Even post day-one patch the optimization still isn't great. While most of the stuttering was fixed, the performance is still wonky. Most of the game I'd stay within the 60-90 FPS range no problem, but in a few late game areas my FPS would just tank to 30 or below for no discernible, even if I dropped the graphic settings to the lowest possible the FPS wouldn't improve much. My PC isn't an insane beast by any means but I could play Elden Ring at the highest possible settings and keep a stable 60 FPS or Cyberpunk post-1.6 at high settings and stay within the 60-90 range, so Callisto playing on closer to medium settings and still dropping that low is just unacceptable.
Some things that Dead Space got right, Callisto gets so wrong. The biggest one to me was how the game determines enemy drops. For some reason, in the last few chapters I'd be walking around at full health with no ammo in my inventory and the game would insist on giving me health gels from defeated enemies. Not the injectors that I could carry around and potentially sell, but the gels that are worthless if you're at full health already. It was a real pain in the ass considering how many fights this late in the game basically require using a gun.
The save system is completely worthless and the checkpoints fluctuate between working as intended or having horrendous spacing. This is especially noticeable in the early game as I died a lot playing on Maximum Security before I got the hang of the gameplay and it was frustrating to die to an encounter and be sent like 3 minuts back. As far as I can tell the save system does literally nothing as even if you reload it all it does is throw you back to the nearest checkpoint and nothing more. What's even the point of a save system at that point?

Overall, the game is fine. It's not the next Dead Space like I'm sure a lot of us were expecting, and if anything it reminds me a lot of The Evil Within just with a sci-fi horror aesthetic instead. There are things that work and things that don't work, and there's still a lot of kinks to iron out that I'm sure as we get closer to the season pass and more patches are released, eventually things will get fixed but as is, I can't really recommend this at full price. I'd probably give it around a 6/10, wait for a sale.