The Callisto Protocol review

Alright, so being strung along for the campaign simply because of the graphics might sound silly but The Callisto Protocol looks like a movie. The facial expressions and motion capture is among the best. Dare I say as good as the Sony PlayStation Studios like The Last of Us Part 1 remake and Horizon Forbidden West. The graphics make The Callisto Protocol very inviting and intriguing. You can notice every sweat droplet moving on Jacob’s face (played by Joshua Duhamel), see the fire dancing in the environment and casting realistic shadows and the texture of pudding-faced zombies in dimly lit corridors of Black Iron prison. The graphics tell a captivating visual story.

Unfortunately, the narrative is not all that compelling. It’s fairly straightforward and if you’ve played Resident Evil then it’s pretty obvious that one bad experiment later, things spiral out of hand. It’s not too shabby though because Dani Nakamura (played by Karen Fukuhara) and other actors breathe life into this ‘undead’ story with plot twists and personal motives. It’s a decent story that convinces you to play till the credits roll, although if you ignore it and just revel in its jump scares and spooky environments, you’ll have an equal amount of fun.

Unlike Resident Evil, the game never makes you feel powerless and it's one of the main reasons why The Callisto Protocol never felt like a spine-chilling horror adventure. Jacob could always shoot limbs off crawling creepies or use the GRP glove to throw their meaty flesh with telekinesis or smack their crooked bodies with an electrified bat. The tools to get out of a high-security prison filled with zombies are always there, the trick is to find your way.

The prison is on Jupiter’s dead moon called Callisto and you unlawfully get thrown inside the prison after a crash landing. The game starts after you wake up in a prison cell and the entire place is turned upside down because of the zombie outbreak. The game pushes you into every nook and cranny of the prison to find a way out. It’s how you slowly uncover the core story of the game and also see some seriously questionable places within the prison. Many environments have spikes on walls to Jedi force push enemies into it using the GRP. It’s sort of silly at times because the environment and its conveniently placed traps don’t actually make sense. Why are there spikes on the wall in a store room? For a satisfying kill of course!

That’s how The Callisto Protocol keeps you engaged. Finding new ways to dismember growling and crawling monstrosities is always fun. Shoot the head and the goo-spitting zombie will inch closer to use its hands to get the job done. Shoot the legs and they’ll start crawling in your direction for a last chomp. We found ourselves entertained while surviving the horrors of Black Iron. However, the enemy variety gets a bit stale very quickly and there are not many enemy types to really amp up the horror nor are there plenty of guns to make the shooting more visceral.

The dodging mechanic is rather simplistic. You have to move left first to avoid the first attack and then right for the second. Once the attack animation is done, you can slap the zombie with an electrified baton or shoot it. It’s easy for veteran gamers and game reviewers like myself but I can see how it might be a welcome letter to new players and casual gamers as well.

Weapons also shoot with a satisfying recoil and the upgrade skill tree is meaningful too. We particularly loved the weapon upgrade animation which uses a 3D printer to chalk out your new upgrade. It looks cool, we only wish it had more details to show while printing. The animations and graphics are one of the best but there are caveats on the PC build.

Our reference Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU was struggling to keep even 35FPS with Ray Tracing on this title. It’s not well-optimized for Nvidia, Intel and AMD cards. We didn’t try the game on our PS5 but console systems have better performance.

Somewhere between being a spooky horror adventure and a fun bash ‘em up. The Callisto Protocol has all the ingredients of a blockbuster title. It’s a visual beauty in the most visceral of ways with some technical impressive feats too. Stomping undead creatures to bring out loot, using Jedi-like powers to throw them onto flesh-chopping blades, managing ammo and crawling through many vents, The Callisto Protocol is a sum of modern graphics and a fetish for dismemberment married to decade-old game mechanics. It still feels engaging because everything looks realistic and the cast is made up of Hollywood greats.