Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Silent Hill 2 and moderate spoilers for The Callisto Protocol. For reference, I played The Callisto Protocol on "Medium Security" difficulty.
This page will be gone soon. Having wriggled out from underneath the thumb of the dastardly Fandom Inc., Giant Bomb is about to undergo a redesign, but not all features will survive that makeover. Most of the elements due for the chopping block are community publications, such as blogs, image galleries, and user reviews like this one.[1] So I thought, why not take the old girl out for one last spin? After all, I have a game that's just as lifeless as this sector of the site will soon be.
For its first several years, EA Redwood Shores was a millstone that ground intellectual property into B-tier flour. You may have a vague nostalgia for their Tiger Woods PGA Tours or Godfather adp;,/aptation. By 2006, EA high command had decided Redwood Shores had done its time in licensing drudgery and earned direction of its own video game.[2] Studio general manager, Glen Schofield, pitched a survival horror that would take Escape from New York and fly it to another planet. The development team dropped the prison break framing like a hot coal, but ploughed ahead with a vision of Event Horizon-System Shock.[3][4][5] Soon, high off of the adrenaline from Capcom's recent release, they switched tracks to making an RE4 among the stars.[5] Their gruesome sci-fi shooter, Dead Space, released in 2008 to equal screams of joy and terror. Newly anointed in zombie offal, Redwood Shores changed its name to Visceral Games the following year.
Dead Space and its protagonist, Isaac Clarke, got the full trilogy treatment, but even the series' sophomore entry did not make back its production and marketing costs. EA then saddled Visceral with adding limp appendices to their Army of Two and Battlefield series. Electronic Arts is a company in a constant state of reappraising its assets, and in 2017, the publisher decided Visceral wasn't earning its keep. It shut the studio's doors for good.[6] Undeterred, Schofield co-founded Sledgehammer Games in 2009, and then poured the concrete for Striking Distance Studios in 2019, placing other ex-Dead Space creatives on its manifest.[7][8] In late 2022, Striking Distance made its maiden voyage with another horror third-person shooter: The Callisto Protocol.
More than just a reminiscence for Visceral's glory days, The Callisto Protocol was its director's chance to finally issue an Alcatraz in space. The game's victim is Jacob Lee, an irritable space trucker bound for Jupiter's frozen moon, Callisto, his cargo unknown even to him. After a terrorist attack forces Jacob into an emergency landing, the warden of Callisto's Black Iron prison inexplicably jails him. Soon, a new kind of inmate is dragging its feet down the halls: disfigured ghouls called Biophages. For Jacob, escaping Black Iron becomes a matter of life and death.
During my first hour with The Callisto Protocol, I was less scared of the Biophages than I was of the game failing to establish its independence. It opens as a bootleg Dead Space. In the Abrahamic faiths, Jacob is the son of Isaac, and in The Callisto Protocol, Jacob has the same lethargic trudge that Isaac Clarke did in Dead Space. Curiously, the courier moves like this even before he plates himself in power armour. Isaac and Jacob both harvest items by stomping open sinewy corpses, and both have their HP hanging from the nape of their neck. The USG Ishimura had rotating fans large enough that a man could squeeze between the fins, and so does Black Iron. The Ishimura was outfitted with weapon upgrade stations, and so is Black Iron. But by my third hour with The Callisto Protocol, none of this seemed to matter anymore. I was on my knees, in the filth, begging Protocol to steal more from Dead Space because, left to its own devices, it is lost. If it were a character in a video game, it wouldn't be Isaac Clarke; it would be that dog at the computer in Silent Hill 2.
The Callisto Protocol has exactly one area of expertise: the interplay of light and materials. God rays slice through cave openings like shafts of sunshine squeezing through your curtains, disturbing your sleep. A reflection model that could have been coded by a physicist overlays cell bars and puddles, converting sight to touch. I can feel how cold, moist, or hard any surface is in this game is just from seeing how it glistens. That lets me know that nowhere is soft enough for Jacob to lay his head. Until he blasts off from this moon, he will not feel a thread of comfort, but neither will I as long as I'm enduring Callisto Protocol's patchy story and monotonous gunplay.
Jacob is the kind of generic bald space marine I thought video games had left behind a long time ago, but he seems like a veritable socialite compared to the zombies he cuts a warpath through. Most of this game's monsters are little more than men with a mottled jerky texture, and you're chin-deep in the campaign before there is any biological or behavioural marrow to fill their bones. Dead Space had a grotesque creativity in its character design. There were quadrupedal babies that sprouted tentacles and that regenerating freak with the glowing snail eyes, but as Stephanie Sterling wrote, all Callisto Protocol's zombies look like they were lifted from an asset store. If the Unity Story sold audio logs, I'd also believe that's where The Callisto Protocol got its loose tapes. They're folders of stock military jabber and white coats wailing, "Oh no! It's transforming". At the same time as these scattered letters are failing to tell a B plot, the campaign is busy not telling an A plot, at least, not between the intro and the end of the second act. The game wins brownie points for a few closing chapters that manage to tie the conspiracies at Black Iron back to the seemingly distant lives of Jacob and the errant fugitive Dani, but it's ultimately too little too late.
Getting to those back pages is also easier said than done when it's often not obvious where the next rally point is. Many levels were blueprinted with the intention that you would backtrack through them, sometimes using alternate paths. They also leave the option open for you to go exploring further afield to find ammo and first-aid kits. It's tidy how the side vessels often loop into Black Iron's arteries, but because stages don't have one main route, they can't pipe you in a single direction. That means that you'll reach junctions where you don't know if you should move left, right, or a third way. The standard solutions for this confusion would be diegetic signage, a map, or as Dead Space opted for, a breadcrumb trail, but as far as The Callisto Protocol is concerned, a failure to navigate is a you problem.
I've given this game a bit of a whooping, but I could still recommend it if its carnage and snap strategisation were on par with Dead Space's, but they're not. There are four guns in The Callisto Protocol. You receive your first, the Pistol, not long after landfall, but once that's in your bandolier, it takes a long period of penny-pinching to buy any other weapon. The four firearms are the Pistol, the Riot Shotgun, the Scattergun, and the Assault Rifle. The first three project a forceful blast immediately in front of you, making them feel closer to one weapon than three. The only break from this air cannon style of shooting comes with the Assault Rifle, which fires like weaponised popcorn, and I love popcorn. However, even as a magpie for ammo, I found my guns never stayed stocked for long, meaning I usually had to fall back on my Stun Baton.
I remember my first few bouts with the Baton well. I ducked away from the frenzied swiping of the Biophages, alternating left and right dodges. Then they let their guard down, and I hit them three times with the truncheon before the loop started over. It was a merger of Dark Souls' sword dances and Dead Space's creaking, rigid survival horror. Once I had my first few zombies laid out on the metal grating, my mind ran away with all the places Striking Distance might be able to take this symbiote. Little did I know that most fights in this game would have me dodging a Grunt's fists two to three times, hitting them with my shock stick, and repeating. You can learn a heavy attack to crack heads with, but there's little functional difference between delivering three light blows and one heavy punch. By the end of the campaign, this riff of left, right, left, right, hit was as familiar to me as my own heartbeat. The Callisto Protocol's fetish for the club is not just withering for the combat; it also forecloses on interesting choices about what weapons you upgrade. If I fight 7 out of 10 battles with the Baton, then it's the obvious candidate for improvement every time.
When I finally met with a new kind of mob, the Blinds, I thought I might have escaped the whirlpool, but they only introduced a fresh monotony. The Blinds will eviscerate you if you approach them head-on, but ambush them from behind, and they'll crumple with a single wallop. This makes for engagements that are concise in comparison to those with the Grunts, but that are even less varied because they consist of only one move. That churn wouldn't be as horrid as it is, but the game has this one-area one-enemy policy. Encounters get stuck in a groove, interesting dynamics fail to emerge between combatants, and we cannot make serious choices about which targets we prioritise. A shooter that is not The Callisto Protocol may have you splitting your attacks between closer enemies and those that pose a higher threat due to their type or weapons. But in Black Iron, strategy is reduced to brainlessly shooting the Biophage with the least distance to you. The decaying also spawn like rabbits, only increasing the repetition and the congestion of Black Iron's Wings. This £60 game takes about 11 hours to beat, and it has to pad itself out even to get there.
If this sci-fi had the same verve as Dead Space, here's where the dismemberment system would step in and offer a cornucopia of combat possibilities. In Dead Space, the same Necromorph might have more or fewer barbs or launchers based on whether you'd severed its arms. You could amputate its legs to hobble it or leave it crawling, but with reproductive enemies like The Dividers, a misplaced shot would only split it into more pests. Each Necromorph subspecies had its weak points in different locations and had unique biological weapons for you to upset by butchering them. The Callisto Protocol technically has a dismemberment mode, but the base game was not traced to support it. Turning this setting on short-circuits the difficulty to the extent that the developers deactivate achievements if you do it. With dismemberment engaged, the animated carcases turn to butter at a touch, further shortening an already prosaic runtime, and there is simply no pushback in fights.
If you can't put down one of the stock goons fast enough, it may mutate into an oversized enforcer, and by "may", I mean most of them will. This boost barely counts as a transformation, however, as it just gives Biophages more vitality, prolonging battles that already feel like a full workday each. There's no mutagen for their weak points, behaviour, or weaponry, leaving all encounters excessively basic. There is another enemy type that turns invisible, sneaks up behind you, takes a cowardly potshot, and then skitters off. Its unpredictable shoves are something different, but they're not fair, not fun, and the "Rusher" only further disrespects my time as a player, having me stalk around looking for disappearing spirits.
You also can't slow any enemies charging at you with Dead Space's Stasis, and Callisto seems outright scared of letting Kinesis out of its kennel. When a designer allows the player to use their environment as a weapon, it grounds the user in the space and combat options transmogrify with every new room the protagonist enters. On Visceral's watch, you could hurl canisters and crates at zombies, even nail Necromorphs to the walls with makeshift pikes. Telekinesis is technically part of The Callisto Protocol field kit, but there are far fewer objects in the environment to use as projectiles than there were on the Ishimura. Turning towards an object to grab it is also a sluggish business. Moreover, the designers can't offer you many environmental hazards to damage enemies, because if there were spinning centrifuges and bottomless pits on every other deck, you'd be unstoppable.
I spent multiple sessions struggling to understand how The Callisto Protocol emerged so expressionless and haphazard, given that it sprang from the minds behind Dead Space. The dots started connecting once I read a little on how the game came to term. According to Glen Schofield:
- The Callisto Protocol was originally bound exclusively for the eighth generation of game consoles. Six months into development, Striking Distance's publisher, Krafton, saddled them with engineering extra versions of it for a new generation of hardware. No one yet knew how to program for the Series X/S or PS5.
- Krafton told Schofield his team would receive three to four months more development time than they did.
- Individual members of SD staff would disappear for weeks at a time due to COVID infection.
- In 2021, about a quarter of the studio quit.
- When Striking Distance tried to reconstitute the game with patches post-launch, Krafton stopped responding to Schofield entirely. This one is genuinely flabbergasting. I have never heard of this happening before.[9]
Schofield may also have throttled the project by instituting crunch, a regime which is increasingly recognised as impeding productive software development. To compensate for rushed production and missing personnel, Striking Distance cut three to four enemies from the game, which would explain why the combat is understaffed.[9] I'd expect plenty else to have gotten cut, too.
As you can tell, I'm pretty fired up about the mangling of The Callisto Protocol because it was not just another horror game. It was the best shot the industry had at continuing the legacy of Dead Space. Visceral is long cold, and EA has declined to publish another original in the series. Clarke stirred briefly in his coffin with 2023's remake of Dead Space 1 before EA, disappointed in its sales, returned him to his slumber. There's unlikely to be another crack at a spiritual successor either. Schofield is long gone from Striking Distance, and the studio was shattered by layoffs, both in 2023 and this year. Schofield also could not extract sufficient funding from investors for his planned post-SD project. It makes me think that for all the mortifying horrors that stalked Jacob on Callisto, maybe publishers were the real moon all along. Thanks for reading.
Notes
- The New Giant Bomb Website Beta Is Here (For Premium Users)! by Chuck (August 12, 2025), Giant Bomb.
- GDC 2009: Reliving Dead Space by Brendan Sinclair (March 27, 2009), GameSpot.
- Glen Schofield by VGC Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed October 19, 2025), Video Games Chronicle.
- Dead Space Dev Diary #1 - Getting to Greenlight by Electronic Arts (March 12, 2008), YouTube.
- How Resident Evil 4 led to Visceral making Dead Space—instead of System Shock 3 by Mat Paget (January 15, 2017), PC Gamer.
- The Collapse Of Visceral’s Ambitious Star Wars Game by Jason Schreier (October 27, 2017), Kotaku.
- Visceral Games (2008). Dead Space Credits. Electronic Arts.
- Striking Distance Studios (2022). The Callisto Protocol Credits. KRAFTON.
- Glen Schofield on Creating Dead Space, Problems with The Callisto Protocol & Directing Call of Duty by Dan Allen (August 5, 2024), YouTube.
All other sources linked at relevant points in article.