izigame.me

This review isn't about Performance issues or Stutters. As you can tell, those with negative reviews don't even have more than an hour of Gameplay to actually talk about the game. As for me, yes I did have stutters my first hour of playing, but performance on Ultra 1440p was acceptable for the most part.
To begin this review I have to take you back to the year 2010 when a little game called
Dead Space
was released. It's the 23rd century and EarthGov has fleets of giant mining spaceships that harvest resources by breaking apart other planets. EarthGov researchers end up finding an alien artifact which they call the Marker. Work begins to reverse engineer the Marker on various research stations across the colonies. The EarthGov researchers discover that the Marker and its duplicates cause living people to suffer paranoia and hallucinations, while also causing the dead to reanimate, becoming "Necromorphs".
Pretty cool story if you ask me. So what was my point of bringing this up? Well you'll never guess it, but you probably already guessed it, The Callisto Protocol is the exact same thing without the charm, character's, and unnerving corridors that made Dead Space the great game we all remember.
Pros:
Visual Art Style/Graphics. I have to hand it to this game, it's beautiful, it's far more than beautiful. it's use of lighting and setting is incredible. At the very beginning there's a cutscene of Neo Future "Japan" where it looks straight out of Cyberpunk and Holy Moly is it something I want to live in. The destruction, the UI, the fancy technology attached to a body and the way doors open nailed the idea of where these characters belong and a future I'd like to live in. I truly mean it when I say this, this game far exceeds any PC game I've seen in visuals and playing it on Ultra with Raytracing was something else.
Enemies: The enemies are pretty nasty looking and a lot of them are clearly inspired from Sci-Fi films and anything space related. There's face huggers, bloated chubs, demogorgons, Twin Flesh and a few more I won't mention to keep from spoiling too much. But I love the design of enemies and even the humanoid ones are pretty cool including Star Killer. Yes Star Killer from SWTFU is in this game.
Unfortunately that's all I have to say in regards to positive..
Cons:
Combat: While at first this seemed like something I was truly going to enjoy, It quickly became boring and a repetitive cycle of "Dodge, Swing, Dodge, Swing, Dodge, Swing". Some enemies even had me on my toes by not only swinging at me once, BUT TWICE! WHOA!! Other enemies would grab you for literally being their only purpose to grab you and create a jump scare only for you to spam Y or X and go on about your business. Some abilities later on in the game try to create more opportunities for combat but don't exactly work as they did in Dead Space or do very little. I played on the hardest mode so I died quite a lot until I realized I just needed to doge and avoid blocking because I would result in taking damage. There's even a point where you are required to hold off enemies until the generator is booted. I just simply stood next to spikes and called it a day.. The Combat is very dry, very repetitive.
Horror: Perhaps it's just me, but the game isn't scary infact the game refuses to give you room to breathe. Do you remember walking a hallway in Dead Space to a girl singing Ring Around the Rosey? Kinda spooky huh? Well here you walk a dark hallway expecting an enemy to attack, and so it happens. And than it happens again, and again. There was never a moment the game decided to let me relax and breathe so that I could potentially be scared. Even the jump scares aren't that great, enemy behind closed door. Wow how'd you come up with that one?
Story: As stated above, the story is more or less as Dead Space had been. Except the characters don't help progress this in any way. The story tries to unravel itself as to why these things are happening but quickly forgets the main character's motive as to why he's here in the first place. Within the first hour of the game you have an incredibly interesting encounter. Who is this chick and why is she robbing my cargo? Well forget about that for the next 5 hours until we remind you of the girl and you've completely forgotten about your past life in the past 18 hours of being in this prison. What about the little black box you picked up at the start of the game? Yea forget about that too until the next 6 hours when we remind you of one cutscene that lead to no where. There's definitely something here, hidden in all the voice modules and terrible pacing of the game.
Exploration: I'm not sure if it's Hard Mode that did this or how the game is meant to be played. But navigating through area's is very weird and difficult. The game never tells you if you're headed the right way. Perhaps this is a good thing more than bad, but I wanted to explore, I wanted to know more about what was happening and it always felt like I was headed in the wrong direction but the story continued to progress making me wonder if there was more or just dead ends?
And that's really it. The game isn't great, it's not terrible either. If I had to rate it based on numbers. Story 5/10. Gameplay 1/10. This isn't Dead Space, and nothing will ever be what that game was and is. If you want to play a true horror experience just wait for Dead Space Remaster.