Conclusion

The Callisto Protocol is fresh fodder for the horror-survival genre. You are stuck on a space station and have to fight your way through hordes of mutated enemies, while discovering the truth about why you're there, and what's going on. If you've played Dead Space before, then you'll be right at home with The Callisto Protocol. While there isn't much in terms of "scare," the excellent visuals and the graphic displays of horror and brutality are certainly impressive.

Take a look at our screenshots on page two. Many of them truly look "next-gen," even though the game uses the previous generation Unreal Engine 4. A vast majority of new releases these days are built on this same engine, Epic has made Unreal Engine 5 available with tons of improvements across the board, but we're still waiting for titles to get released on that new engine version. When taking a closer look at the screenshots, you can see that great immersion is achieved by clever lighting effects, most of which are pre-baked and not dynamic. During normal gameplay you will not notice this tradeoff though. My compliments go out to the texture artists who created very richly detailed environments that are often based on relatively simple models. For example, the floors in most areas are completely flat, but they are well-decorated with additional details that make them look more busy, and less flat.

In terms of hardware requirements, The Callisto Protocol is quite demanding. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Radeon RX 6700 XT, or an RTX 2080—that's with ray tracing disabled. For 1440p gaming, an RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070 or Radeon RX 6800 is required to achieve 60 FPS and beyond. If you're gaming at 4K then you'll need an RTX 3080 Ti or better—not a single Radeon graphics card currently available will hit 4K60. If you're playing the integrated benchmark then things will look different, because the benchmark will spit out way too optimistic numbers—we used our own test scene, which represents a demanding but not worst-case scenario. Generally, AMD Radeon graphics cards do a little bit worse than their counterparts from NVIDIA, but the differences are not huge. Still, it's surprising that in this AMD-sponsored title, the competition seems to have an edge.

If you've looked up any reviews for The Callisto Protocol, you'll certainly have read about the stuttering. I'm surprised how the game made it through Q&A with that much stuttering. Due to the way Unreal Engine is used, the first time you see a graphics effect, your gameplay will hang while the system compiles the shader that will be used during rendering of that effect—completely unacceptable—no idea how they missed that. After thousands of negative reviews, the developer pushed out a patch that precompiles the most-used shaders while at the main menu. This makes the main menu a stuttery mess, but gameplay is more fluid. The stutter issues are not fixed completely, but at least the game is very playable now. This year we've seen several titles with shader compilation issues—hard to imagine that there's still developers that haven't gotten the memo. The upcoming version 5 of Unreal Engine specifically adds features to address shader compilation stuttering, but it'll be a while before we'll see widespread adoption.