YMMV / The Callisto Protocol

• Audience-Alienating Ending: The Final Transmission DLC has an ending that became incredibly polarizing. It all turns out to be a Dying Dream while Jacob is, in reality, a barely lucid, mangled torso being probed for what he knows before he finally dies. Players slammed it for coming across as a weak, depressing ending with an undertone of Torch the Franchise and Run, given the base game's own mixed reception.
• Demonic Spiders: Big Mouths. They show up in the third chapter, right after you get your first gun, and remain a constant threat through the rest of the game. They're much more durable than the regular Grunts and deal serious damage with their blows. What really makes them awful is the fact that they're the only Biophage that has a ranged attack, which allows them to wittle down your health while engaging other enemies. Thankfully, their ranged attacks can be blocked to lessen the damage and they rarely use melee combos on you, but chances are that they'll be responsible for a lot of early game deaths.
  • The Blind. While they're only encountered in the sixth and seventh chapters, those chapters are filled with almost nothing but them. They are frequently encountered in massive groups of four or five, where Jacob must carefully take them down with stealth if he doesn't want to earn the entire horde's wrath. Despite looking brittle and frail, they're the most durable and damaging Biophages encountered at that point in the game. And if you're crazy enough to use your guns, the sheer size of the group will wipe out most of your supplies.
• Game-Breaker: Upgrading the GRP Glove's battery power and velocity to max (which can easily be done before the midgame, if you're conserving your Callisto Credits) makes most rank-and-file enemy encounters a breeze, as you can simply grab and throw enemies into spiked walls or off railings, which will instantly kill them. The game liberally places these surfaces throughout the gameworld, making it a question of when, not if, players will take advantage of them. Even several of the game's more challenging setpieces can be trivialized by simply throwing enemies away as soon as you spot them, and it's enough to make the Maximum Security difficulty much more manageable.
  • The Assault Rifle becomes this in New Game Plus. Once you're able to upgrade it, it becomes a killing machine, being able to fell just about any Biophage in a few bursts. And it's very cost effective with ammo, as each Assault Rifle drop usually gives you between ten and twenty bullets. It's alt-fire mode that gives it homing bullets isn't too shabby either. It's entirely possible to go through the whole game using nothing but the Assault Rifle and Stun Baton, which will allow you to sell your other guns' ammo to save up for upgrades faster. The only downside is it requires 1,000 Callisto Credits just to print, and it's upgrades are much more expensive than the other weapons.
• Goddamned Bats: Parasites are the weakest Biophages, being able to be killed in one hit from anything, but love to jump on Jacob in a QTE to wittle his health down and usually pop out in tight spaces and in groups. Even more obnoxious is the fact that they hide in some of the supply caches found throughout the game to keep you on edge.
  • Bloodworms. They emerge from eggs that are nearly indistinguishable from the scenic ones seen all over the game. Once they pop out, you have a literal split second to react before they latch on to you in a Press X to Not Die event. No matter how hard you mash your controller, they always chop off a fair amount of Jacob's health. Thankfully, there's only a few encountered in the game and they usually give decent drops after being killed. However, taking out their eggs before they attack will rob you of their loot.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Many people were unhappy with the game’s relatively short run time of about 7-10 hours on average.
• Narm Charm: One of the new death scenes for the Blinded involves a sequence straight out of Mortal Kombat - a Punch Catch before the monster severs Jacob's arm, then as he turns around in a pained daze, it punches through his chest before severing his OTHER arm, culminating in rapidly impaling his torso with its fists... and then destroying his head for good measure. On the one hand, it's ridiculous, coming across as over the top in a bad way. On the other hand, it fits in perfectly with how the Biophage revel in brutalizing and maiming their prey before finally killing them to maximize the suffering, so it still sort of works.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • A common criticism leveled against the game's emphasis on melee combat (see more under Scrappy Mechanic) is that it makes the monsters feel less scary. In one-on-one fights, enemies pose little threat and you're never afraid to let them into melee range because of just how capable Jacob is. And when multiple enemies are involved, engaging in melee combat is more frustrating than scary.
  • Some death scenes involve Jacob's head adopting the same damage model - the upper half of his face and most of the skull gone, with only the back of his head remaining. Once you realize it, it can snap you out of the horror factor.
  • If Captain Ferris kills Jacob in his first form, he punches Jacob's face so hard and repeatedly that it comically dents inwards, making for a rather hilarious death.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PC version launched to an overwhelmingly negative reception, due to pronounced and inconsistent graphics stutter (even on some high-end machines, but not on others), suggesting optimization issues caused by Unreal Engine 4's shader compilation with certain builds. This was made worse by the publishers forcing the use of the notoriously problematic anti-piracy DRM tool, Denuvo.
  • The Xbox version sent to reviewers ran worse than the PlayStation version and had fewer visual effects, despite both systems having similar power. Most of this was patched for the consumer release.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the game is the shallowness of the combat system, which "locks" you against a single opponent. You are completely stationary and have to actively dodge the attacks of your target before retaliating. While it works well enough when handling lone enemies, the system struggles when multiple enemies are involved, since you cannot dodge attacks from an enemy you're not locked on to and you cannot maneuver while locked on, and if an enemy manages to attack from behind you're pretty much already dead because there's no way you can turn around fast enough to engage it before it kills you. The kicker is that this is really the only way to engage with enemies, besides using the GRP to throw them into environmental hazards, since guns only have limited effectiveness and certainly cannot stop a Biophage before it closes into melee range. It also doesn't help that for a combat system so heavily focused around melee combat, Jacob will only ever have one melee weapon for the entire game, meaning there's no way to change up fighting styles. Making it worse, the "Auto Dodge" accessibility feature does not work at all, not doing as advertised and requiring players to use the finicky dodge system even if they are not good enough.
  • At numerous points, players are funneled into narrow tunnels Jacob has to shimmy through, with any potential jump scares mined from this setup more-or-less being abandoned after the midway point of the plot. The problem is that none of these forced crawl sequences are used to mask loading screens or checkpoints — those occur at entirely-different points, making the whole setup of why there are so many of these forced moments in the first place questionable.
  • Some reviewers have complained that Jacob moves too slow either with his default movement, or especially when crouched. There is no way to quick heal and it takes too long. Healing during any fight is a death sentence and is better done before or after an encounter. Weapon switching takes too long as well, and there is no way to quick swap, because Jacob's long animations take priority for the sake of "realism".
  • While the game does have autosaves and manual saves, it also has some sporadic or inconsistent checkpoints. If a player never bothers reloading their manual save, they could put themselves in an unwinnable situation, forcing them to load an earlier save, wasting time and losing progress. Another problem is all cut-scenes are unskippable (until patches rectified this), making restarting fights more tedious and frustrating.
  • The game loves to throw up locked doors behind you without warning as you progress through the game. Many players and reviewers complained about the far-too-common situation of finding a resource cache, realizing that they couldn't carry everything due to the limited inventory, and then progressing through the game, getting into a fight a few minutes later, expending some resources, and deciding to go back for the rest of the supply cache only to be met with a locked door preventing them from backtracking.
  • The sudden shift from a linear beat-em-up to an actual stealth-horror game in the last few chapters when the Blind start appearing is an interesting change in gameplay... for the first few encounters. However, the two underground chapters are almost nothing but Blind encounters, and having to stealth through them all eventually starts to really kill the pacing of the game.
• So Okay, It's Average: While the game is visually stunning, the gameplay is at least playable (barring the issues detailed under porting disaster), and the game is overall competently made, the game suffers from an underbaked and fickle combat system, questionable story decisions, a relatively short run time, and a disasterous PC port at launch. While the game is seen as bad, it's seen as a mediocre and underwhelming successor to Dead Space and was swiftly forgotten after the release of the Dead Space (Remake) the following month.
• Spiritual Successor: The game is clearly one for Dead Space, since it was created by many of the same people and has similar themes. To wit:
  • The dark, foreboding interior of Black Iron is equivalent to the derelict Ishimura from the original game, while the frozen exterior hearkens back to Tau Volantis from Dead Space 3.
  • The enemies in The Callisto Protocol are similar to the necromorphs, mutated humans who have been infected by an alien parasite. The main difference appears to be that in this game, the parasites can infect still-living humans instead of just corpses.
  • The integration of the HUD into the characters and environment, such as Jacob's health bar being a green light on the back of his neck and remaining ammunition being displayed via holograms on the guns themselves, is very similar to Isaac's gear in Dead Space.
  • A sequence midway through the game has Jacob fall off a tall platform (in this case, after the ship Dani calls down is destroyed by Cole) falling and having to navigate debris as he descends in a very similar manner to that of several sequences in both Dead Space and Dead Space 2 where Isaac is forced to navigate through debris in the same fashion (dodging large pieces of falling ships, some of which he has to fly through).
  • The GRP (Gravity Restraint Projector) Glove bears a striking resemblance to the Kinesis Module from the aforementioned franchise — both are telekinetic abilities utilized through a device that can be upgraded with various additional functions, and function in very similar ways (namely, being able to pick up explosive or melee weapons to fling at enemies).
  • While the basic plot setup, in which the protagonist is a prisoner in a lunar Penal Colony overrun by monsters in a sci-fi Survival Horror riff on Escape from New York, wasn't in any of the Dead Space games, it was derived from Glen Schofield's original pitch for the game, which was retooled because EA didn't like the prison setting.
  • The outbreak turns out to have been caused by the dirty deeds of highly placed government officials who are members of a secret society/cult with transhumanist goals.
  • While the similarities to Dead Space are obvious, this game also seems to be heavily inspired by Escape from Butcher Bay with the environment and story, as well as the focus on melee combat, lighting, firearms, and monsters in a prison environment on a hostile planet.
  • The overall story is also remarkably similar to The Suffering, only taking place on Callisto rather than an island with a bad history. Like this game, the playable character is a prisoner who escapes their cell shortly after arrival when monsters cause a facility-wide emergency and slaughter inmates and guards alike while the player character, who may or may not be innocent, searches for a way off the island and to survive the madness around him while wielding melee weaponry and firearms. However, The Suffering does feature more use of ranged combat since ammo is fairly well abundant and has multiple endings based on character decisions that determine Torque's guilt or lack thereof in the crime he's accused of, while here, firearms are more a supplement to melee most of the time, and Jacob's not exactly a criminal, but he is guilty of inadvertently causing the Europa disaster as a result of "just doing his job" and not questioning anything, eschewing multiple interpretations or endings altogether.
  • Both games end with the main character, who's started to suffer from hallucinations, being jumpscared by a character that's already been established as Deader than Dead (Nicole in Dead Space, Captain Ferris in Callisto Protocol).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Despite the game's resemblance to Dead Space, some fans have pointed out the resemblance is only cosmetic at best, with the game either changing or outright omitting key features from Dead Space. Overall, people who were attracted by the idea of Dead Space with the Serial Numbers Filed Off were very put off to find they were playing something that conceptually and gameplay-wise was much more akin to Silent Hill: Homecoming or The Order: 1886.
  • The game is almost completely linear with no opportunities to voluntarily backtrack, as opposed to Dead Space where the player was relatively free to explore their environment.
  • There is a noticeable lack of puzzles in the game, with advancement boiling down to finding a code on a guard's corpse or swapping fuses between different gate controls.
  • The game is more heavily combat focused, especially melee combat, when in Dead Space the player was encouraged to try and avoid direct confrontation with Necromorphs and attack them from range.
  • Items and ammo are rather abundant in the game, so the the player is quite often never really short on anything they need while resource management is crucial in Dead Space.
  • There is very little enemy variety. While they have many visually diverse designs, the monsters are all ultimately defeated in the exact same way with the player simply shooting or beating them to death. They lack the unique weakspots of Necromorphs that forced Dead Space players to engage each and every enemy differently.
• Tough Act to Follow: Since the game was developed by some of the team behind Dead Space, expectations were extremely high for it to carry on the Dead Space legacy. It ended up having even more of an uphill battle with the PC version being universally slammed for abysmal performance and the combat system feeling lackluster and frustrating. The actual remake of Dead Space coming out only a month later to widely glowing reviews didn't help much either.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The zombie creatures actually do mutate and evolve over the course of the game in various grotesque ways, and there is a functional dismemberment system like in Dead Space. Except any time an enemy mutates, it's more like a health refill than a new pattern or challenge of any sort, and the only dismemberment that matters is crippling enemy legs; otherwise they'll ignore losing arms or being beheaded and just keep attacking like nothing happened.
  • The Security Units are woefully underutilized. Despite seeming to comprise most of Black Iron's security personnel, Jacob only encounters a paltry three of them in the entire game and the first one can't be interacted with since Jacob only possesses a crowbar at the time. They could've been used more to add tension and much needed variety to enemy encounters by invoking Mêlée à Trois as a double-eded sword, where they could be provoked into clearing out Biophages from an area at the cost of giving Jacob a much stronger enemy to deal with. Instead, the Units and Biophages are never encountered in the same area.This could be intentional given that Warden Cole is probably responsible for the defective ones you encounter due to not wanting external variables disrupting his experiment to find his Alpha.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game looks absolutely stunning, with even the harshest critical reviews heaping praise upon the gorgeous visuals of the game.

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