The Callisto Protocol - Final Transmission (PC) - Review

by Paul Broussard , posted on 06 July 2023 / 5,003 Views

Well, here we are. After seven long months, The Callisto Protocol has finally dragged itself out once again, battered and bruised from its initial reception, to deliver its long-promised story DLC and, more importantly, resolve the cliffhanger from the main game. I frankly don’t even have the energy to pretend like there’s a genuine question about it being good; you know it’s going be boring, I knew it was going to be boring, let’s just find out how boring.

Final Transmission picks up immediately after the events of the base game and involves Jacob’s attempt to escape Black Iron Prison for good. It quickly becomes clear that not all is as it seems, however, as funny words and mysterious symbols start appearing. Jacob must navigate through the various locations in Black Iron Prison again to escape, in order to reach the end and allow the most obvious story twist of all time to play out. There was actually quite a bit of potential here, with some room for the gameplay to play off of his delusions over what's real and what isn't, which a very late segment of Final Transmission starts to lean into a little bit, but by that point it's so close to the end that it never has much room to go anywhere.

So the story’s still not much to talk about, but what about the gameplay? Not much has evolved on that front either. You navigate around a rather linear environment and fight monsters when they appear. Melee combat hasn’t changed very much, which I found a bit surprising considering how many people complained about it originally. In fairness, you do start off with all of your weapons from the end of the main game, so perhaps the solution for this was just letting people handle the majority of the DLC's challenges by way of gun instead if they so desire.

There are a few new gameplay twists, but as one might expect from The Callisto Protocol they aren’t really put to good use. The biggest is an emphasis on new biomechanical sentries (basically giant Bionicles gone rogue). There’s a big discussion about how dangerous they are, but bullets and your usual baton work just fine on them as long as you don’t get overwhelmed, and later on you get a hammer that lets you turn them into mincemeat, so I came away wondering what the big deal was supposed to be. There were so many interesting directions that they could have gone with this, like turning them into a stalker-like character, or perhaps a fleshed out combat design that would force you to fight them differently than normal enemies. Instead they’re just standard enemies with bigger health bars. There was room for so much more, but it goes to waste.

The atmosphere is still a bust as well, with little in the way to build tension or fear. There are a copious amount of jump scare enemies, but even these are reused from the base game. There are a few areas that look like they might descend into some organic, fleshy body horror, but they wind up just being interesting visual pieces and don't actually contribute to the feelings you experience while playing. Something like Dead Space would use these environments as a way to introduce a lore concept, or maybe mess with the player from a gameplay standpoint, but here they're just backdrop imagery. It’s, sing it with me now, wasted potential.

It feels like that summarizes Final Transmission, and indeed The Callisto Protocol as a whole. There are plenty of interesting ideas, but none of them are fully realized. The story remains shallow and predictable, there's little tension or horror beyond excessive gore, and there's little room for exploration or interesting discovery. Everything feels so underdeveloped, and even my favorite part of The Callisto Protocol - messing around with the GRP in combat - doesn’t have the same spark because there's little in the way of new enemies to use it on. Final Transmission brings nothing new to the table mechanically for a title that desperately needed it. It's all perfectly functional, but snooze worthy; it's the plain Cheerios of the horror genre.

Following the interviews director Glen Schofield has given, I have to imagine a big part of this was the sheer amount of resources that had to be dedicated to the game’s graphical fidelity, taking away from how much could be dedicated to implementing new gameplay ideas. If that’s true, it’s perhaps the most ironically tragic part of this whole affair, because despite the sheer amount of effort and money put into making it look ultra realistic, it’s already been surpassed in photorealism by other titles like Resident Evil 4 and Final Fantasy XVI. All of that effort and most of the $160 million budget could have been put towards creating unique, engaging gameplay elements, or an interesting story, or, heck, even a memorable soundtrack. Instead, it was spent making The Callisto Protocol the most realistic-looking title on the market, and it didn’t even hold that title for half a year.

There really isn’t much more to say about Final Transition into Mediocrity that I didn't already say in my Callisto Protocol review, so I’m going to take this opportunity to soapbox a little bit. A few weeks back, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty noted that games were now taking 4-6 years to develop, compared to 2-3 years in previous generations, in large part because of how much more effort is required to create high-end visuals. Final Transmission, and The Callisto Protocol in general, shows how utterly insane this attitude is. We’re being delivered games that are often sabotaging their own quality because of how good they have to look, and even if they do play great, we have to wait much longer for them. And all this effort is for what? They won’t even comparatively look that great in a few years' time. The industry has become an ouroboros, devouring itself so it can deliver increasingly photorealistic titles at the expense of everything else. I can’t think of a single game so far this generation that I would have scored lower had it featured visuals that could've been produced by last generation hardware.

I realize my sway as a random internet reviewer on a small site is pretty limited, but I’ll give this a shot regardless: if, by some miracle, a publisher happens to be reading this, please, there are very few titles that need to look super realistic. I would much rather play games sooner, with more interesting & innovative designs, and have them cost less, than be able to see the individual pores on the main character’s face or something. And for consumers, please don’t write off titles just because they don’t look completely immaculate. While it’s true that the first impression is with the eyes, the most important part of a game is how it plays, and it should be evaluated on that above all else. Otherwise, we’ll end up with more and more titles like The Callisto Protocol; a feast for the eyes and a famine for everything else.