The Callisto Protocol - Dead Space spiritual successor?

Same here. I almost bought it the other night and then I looked at what you get with the pre-order: a different colored suit or something.

I said. “No thank you”, I’ll wait until after launch so I don’t get the suit of shame.

After playing roughly an hour and a half, I’m left on the fence on if I will attempt to refund this via Microsoft or not.

It’s a wonderful-looking game that definitely invokes the same feeling I had playing Dead Space for the first time but the game feels ‘heavy’ in a way that comes across as an impediment whereas it felt impactful in Dead Space.

I think it’s largely the extreme focus on melee and the dodge mechanic. It looks cool and feels very cinematically impressive but sometimes I feel like I did dodge or I did swing my baton quite a bit before it actually registers.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge issue and I could live with the momentum of things, but the camera is pushed too close to your back and it has become so tedious to manage a room full of these ghouls because even the camera doesn’t move quick enough to get your bearings.

The first gun doesn’t help much as crowd control. Shooting largely feels like an afterthought- as if it was some placeholder unreal engine asset that was left in because people would expect it to be here.

I’m left wondering if this would’ve worked better as a Condemned-style melee game where you very rarely have a gun at all and instead are ripping space pipes out of the space wall to defend yourself.

Callisto’s currently sitting at 21% on Steam after 500 reviews. The port must be rough.

Waypoint’s resident horror aficionado isn’t too impressed with either the game’s attempts to recreate Dead Space or its scares.

For a more enthusiastic take, the Digital Foundry dude, while cautioning against the PC version, thinks it’s great.

What a pleasant first post!
Welcome, @Degausser!

Welcome to QT3, enjoy your stay.

Are you playing console or PC version? How does it run?

And yeah I read the dodge system is weird, and the death animations are fun the first time, annoying as hell every other time.

Ugh, that first review sounds bad. And the Steam rating . . .

Excellent steam review:

The Callisto Protocol™ is an FPS horror game, the real horror is in the FPS.

Heh, another called it “The Stuttering Protocol”.

I guess I’m glad I pulled the trigger on Midnight Suns instead of this

Pros
-Great graphics
Cons
-Bad pc performance
-barebones, predictable story
-Basic ass game with zombies as enemies and jump scares. No real horror.
-Very linear, almost no exploration.
-Nothing to break up the pace: no deep rpg mechanics, no stealth, no new mechanics that appear, very few ‘set piece’ moments, very few bosses (1 boss, 1 miniboss you fight 4 times).
-Melee focused combat that feels way too rigid, and trivial once you understand it… that’s on 1vs1, against many enemies it all falls apart

…and I still haven’t finished watching it

Reviews are definitely all over the place.

Eurogamer recommends it, for instance.

Most of those bullet points applied to Dead Space too. I had those criticisms for that game as well, but despite all that, what it did well, it did really well. I ended up loving it.

The melee focused combat does concern me, as @Degausser also mentions though. I don’t remember using melee in Dead Space, it was the plasma cutter 99% of the time. And plasma cutter was tight.

I’m not sure why this is a critique. It was true of the Dead Space games as well. In fact, I can’t think of a survival horror game where it’s not true.

Signalis, for a recent one. Early Resident Evils for another. Part of the pleasure of classic survival horror for me is learning the space and managing risk and resources as you traverse it.

Meanwhile, New Game+ and hardcore permadeath coming on February 7th.

I think that’s 2 weeks after the Dead Space remake comes out.

With the mixed reviews, now I’m thinking I should wait and play the Dead Space remake first?

He explains it in the video, how usually very linear games have more scripted, set piece moments or are more narrative heavy in exchange, but that doesn’t happen here.

DF like the absence of objective markers, which linear design presumably helps.

I saw that the average was about 7/10, so I bought and played a couple of hours with this(on PS5).

It’s pretty good…ish. In the very first playable sequence, the game tasked me with going back to the cockpit, which I did, only to find out I did it the wrong way to start the next scripted sequence. Then your co-pilot dies, and enunciates perfectly out of like half a face. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but it really was.

Following that, you’re thrown into space prison for reasons(I’ll wait and see if there’s a good explanation coming for that), and shit instantly goes sideways before you even wake up in your cell. The pacing for this thing is all over the place.

And yes, the combat is weird. So far it seems that the gun is an enhancement to the melee, and not the other way around. Each baddie comes at you and it initiates a kind of mini Mike Tyson’s punchout where you’re using the left stick to doge instead of move around. It’s awkward.

I could forgive a lot of this rails stuff if the writing were better, but so far it’s pretty generic. The thing I love the most so far is the visual design. It’s got a lot of cool stuff visually, but it’s just not held up by the world building or writing so far.

Oh and one nitpick. You can only play the audio logs by standing still and listening to them in a menu. Like Bioshock solved this more than a decade ago! I guess it works out, though, because so far the logs do nothing but explain what very obviously happened to a character in the room where you find their corpse.

Did I say pretty good? After typing all this out, I’m finding myself re-evaluating.

@Paul_cze @Left_Empty

Thanks for the welcome.

I’m playing on Xbox. Both the Seies S and Series X. I was going to go with the PC version but those specs sounded off for me since they were announced and it turns out, that was correct.

I’m still on the fence on trying to refund. I think what made Dead Space so fun, for me, was the combat loop of how to crowd control.

Dismembering one, strategic use of stasis, launching a mangled limb at another in the distance…there was a management loop that made it rewarding to play smart and the play spaces were big enough to maneuver. This was expanded on in Dead Space 2.

Here I feel like I’m too often wondering if the dodge is going to work and almost mashing the melee attack hoping I do enough damage before they can get a hit off because, oh look, there are two behind me, that I cannot see because the camera is too pulled in, absolutely shredding my back apart.

As I said, I can deal with momentum and don’t hate the idea of a melee-focused taking on space horror. But this doesn’t feel quite how I’d want or expect a spiritual successor to feel.

I want to support this game because I want to support this style of game but I’m left feeling a little cold. Very reminiscent of my experience with The Evil Within. I had high hopes that were largely dashed. The sequel, however, was wonderful.

I guess I’ll make a final decision when I finish at work.

I haven’t played this, only watched a couple of streams so far today, but I’m really digging what I’m seeing. I’m definitely going to have to pick this up at some point.