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The most unique attack that Lee has in his arsenal in The Callisto Protocol is known as GRP. For a game that wanted to be a spiritual successor to Dead Space, I was shocked to see just how trite its weapons were. These guns can be upgraded over time and can unlock variant firing modes, but even then, they still largely operate in the same ways. Every gun you'll obtain over the course of The Callisto Protocol is some variant of a pistol, shotgun, or assault rifle. Guns are also present in The Callisto Protocol, but unlike what was seen with Dead Space, there aren't any weapons that feel unique or fun to use. Lee's hand-to-hand attacks remain one-note for the entirety of the game, and the added dodging and blocking mechanics don't do much to shake things up. This is a fine idea on paper, but the melee combat seen in the game is far too basic to ever be fun beyond the first hour. Much of the combat in The Callisto Protocol encourages you to use melee attacks in an attempt to save ammo. In a general sense, Lee acquires a number of tools over the course of the game, each of which are pretty varied from one another. Gameplay is the part of The Callisto Protocol that I find myself most disappointed with.

It's an annoying feature and is one that I'm shocked to see is present in a 2022 video game. Rather than being able to listen to these recordings while moving onward through a given level, you instead have to stop everything you're doing, find the audio log in question that you just picked up, and then activate it. And while this is a perfectly adequate way of filling in the gaps, my main annoyance on this front is that audio logs can't even be listened to unless you access them manually from the game's menu. One of my bigger issues with the storytelling of The Callisto Protocol is that many of the finer details and lore of this world are fleshed out via audio logs that can be collected over the course of the game. So much so, in fact, that I was able to determine what would happen at the game's conclusion hours before reaching it. Still, without much depth, Callisto becomes pretty predictable and unengaging. I think horror stories often work best when their central conflicts are quite basic, so to have the vast majority of The Callisto Protocol center around this idea of escaping Black Iron Prison works pretty well. The story of The Callisto Protocol is very straightforward, and for the most part, I don't have a problem with this. Through the aid of a number of other characters that Lee comes across, you're tasked with trying to find a way off of Callisto while also uncovering how this monstrous outbreak began in the first place. It's here that the central protagonist Jacob Lee (portrayed by Josh Duhamel) finds himself trapped within Black Iron Prison as it's overrun with vicious, mysterious monsters.

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Much like the Dead Space series which The Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield helped establish back in 2008, The Callisto Protocol is a sci-fi horror game that takes players to the titular moon on Callisto. And while Callisto largely hits all of the basic benchmarks that you'd expect from a game of this type, it doesn't do anything special to make it a memorable experience. In the absence of Dead Space and other games like it over the past decade, The Callisto Protocol is releasing here at the end of 2022 to give a shot in the arm to the survival-horror genre. The Callisto Protocol could have been a lot better than it is.

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