GENRE: Action-Horror
GAME LENGTH: Average (10 Hours)
REPLAYABILITY: Mediocre
DIFFICULTY: Moderate
Made by the devs of the original “Dead Space” series, “The Collisto Protocol” serves as a spiritual successor to said franchise, while also serving somewhat as an amalgam of what they potentially wanted to do for “Dead Space 3” but were not allowed. The only problem is that this game seeks to emphasize action over atmosphere.
When you start up “The Collisto Protocol”, it does not give you a good first impression. You are left watching at least 15 minutes of in-game cutscenes interspersed through an extremely linear environment teaching you all about how to do the most basic controls possible, with a character that feels awkward to control. Over time you get used to the movement, which tries to emulate momentum, to a much more exaggerated degree than in other games of its kind – and annoyingly so – while cutscenes become gradually less and less common. The game opens up just barely achieving basic freedom, but it is still a far-cry from the type of freedom “Dead Space” gave you.
The game takes primarily on a planet somewhere…in space…and takes place mostly within the confines of a prison. You diverge here and there, venturing off into a habitat, science lab, former colony, and so on, so the game does try to diversify its locations. And while the game provides a modicum of freedom in exploring those environments in the sense of exploring ‘side pathways’, there are a couple major criticisms that keep them from becoming genuinely fun. First off, these side pathways are mostly very blatant divergences from the main story path. They are not simply a bunch of rooms scattered about making it feel livable along your main pathway, they are long hallways that lead to semi-large areas that you loot for piss-poor amounts of credits, possibly hoping for a valuable item to run across and potentially sell. The second problem is that it is hard to tell often times which direction is the side path, and which is the main path, leading to extensive backtracking as you explore to see just how far one path goes. So, if you want that full ’10 hours of gameplay’ that I listed up above, you are going to be trapsing back and forth between split paths, backtracking to-and-fro just to see if the path you are on is the main path that you may inevitably accidentally lock yourself out of backtracking to see the side content. And this game loves locking you out of the ability of backtracking to see side content you could have missed. On at least two occasions I had to reload a save because I went ahead to see if the path, I was on was the main path, only to get hit by a cutscene that pushed my character out of being able to backtrack to the side path that I was planning on exploring. This is not how you earn the good will of the player.
Thankfully the game has quite impressive visuals. Despite taking place mostly on a claustrophobic sci-fi planetoid space prison, the game can still impress you with the minutiae of its environmental design, with lots of pipework, wiring, and techno-gadgetry to fill every last nook and cranny, keeping your eyes visually distracted enough to take your mind off its linearity. If there was one game that I would not mind playing again just to experience it in 4K, “The Callisto Protocol” would definitely be on that list. The one thing I wished they had worked on just a little bit more though would have to be the enemy design. There are a few compelling designs for the enemies, like the invisible wall-climbing monsters, and the blind ones that wander aimlessly, and the weird head catapults that launch out of egg sacks, but the ones you fight for most of the game just look like people with Tree Man Syndrome. Would it have been very hard to make them look a little more unique? They otherwise come off as generic infected that could be inserted as place holders into almost any other horror game.
As for the gameplay, the game is surprisingly fun after you get past the 2-hour long introduction, and yes, the game’s introduction is 2 hours long. While it technically lets you ‘roam around’ and ‘explore’ before that 2-hour mark, you do not have your full abilities until then. You are mostly using a stun baton and a gun, and only after that initial 2 hours do you finally get your ‘GRP’ (which, honestly, is just a rebranded kinesis module from “Dead Space”). After that the gameplay does get pretty involved, and if you are playing on one of the harder difficulties, ammo is surprisingly sparse, but not exceedingly difficult. After all, this is not a ‘survival horror’. The amount of combat involved turns this game into an ‘action-horror’, which I do not have a problem with. The one thing I do have a problem with is when this game tries to act like a survival horror game, which it does so poorly.
There is virtually only one enemy in the game that you can ‘sneak past’, and this enemy is exceedingly easy to stealth kill, is extremely plentiful within the sections it populates, and it provides little incentive to actually sneak past it since the ammo and credits you get from killing them are better than your typical creature, and there is no penalty for killing them since creatures ignore other dead bodies and stealth killing almost never alerts other enemies, unless you literally bump into someone else while performing them. So, this means that almost all of the ‘stealth segments’ in this game are actually just ‘stealth kill’ segments. There is one section where you have to sneak past a security robot, but that is about it.
Thankfully the combat is pretty satisfying. Enemies react to your weapons with heavy and weighty animations, and melee is surprisingly more in-depth than you would assume at first. There is a heavy attack, light attack, dodge, parry, and counter system, which you can upgrade to improve your move selection and capabilities from. The only problem with melee is that the block function has a tendency to randomly work, or randomly let the monster chop your head off. Kind of a deal-breaker when convincing the player to rely on it. So more often than not, you will be relying on long ranged attacks, or your basic bread-and-butter combos to finish off targets in melee after softening them up with ranged attacks. The GRP also provides a quick means of dispatching enemies as you fling them into conveniently placed ornamental spiked walls (a necessity for any evil-bad prison trying its hardest to look intimidating), throwing around explosive cannisters (a staple of any high security prison), throwing them into large, exposed, rotary bladed air vents (safety was the number one concern at this prison), beat them to death with mop-buckets laying around in every other room (ignore how grody and dank the prison is, that is only part of the charm the seemingly infinite janitorial staff – that this game implies the prison had – worked very hard to keep looking this way), or throwing them off ledges. The guns are also satisfying to shoot, with loud, thumping audio, gore where you can blow off limbs and even blow off body chunks, and ammo that is thankfully not universal like it was in “Dead Space 3”, making you rely on your variety of arms instead of finding the one-size-beats-all approach and spamming that.
In terms of the story, the acting is great, the pacing feels satisfying, the tone is just right, and everything seems to be pushing for it to be well told and interesting…except it isn’t. The game is trying to set you up for a twist that you do not see coming, only it cheats in getting this twist. It revokes information the player should have had to set up a twist that, in all truthfulness, is not that shocking, to tell a story that is not very engaging, and honestly ends up feeling like a patch-work of a plot with numerous holes left unexplained. It feels sloppy. Which is disappointing given how well the actors convince you that you should be caring. I think part of the problem is that they were banking on this game being such a success that they were expecting to make a sequel out of it which might explain the hap-hazard, thrown together, pile of shit DLC they called an ‘ending’, which was likely made as a result of the lackluster sales and poor reviews, and not at all intended as part of the post-release content. While the game is a flawed gem, the DLC should be completely avoided. For as mild as the ending is to the full game, the DLC ending feels like a low-rent “Tales From The Crypt” episode, only instead of an asshole getting what he deserves like in that show, we are talking about a character you just spent the last 10 hours with, and the developers getting you to try and empathize with him.
6/10
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