The Callisto Protocol review: notebook and desktop benchmarks

The Callisto Protocol is a spiritual successor to Dead Space, an excellent action horror game developed by Visceral Games and published by EA in 2008. Running on the Unreal Engine, this new take on the space survival genre is the very first title developed by Striking Distance Studio. To put it delicately, the company's debut isn't exactly great – at least from a technical standpoint. Similar to many other games released in the past few months, The Callisto Protocol launched in a very unfinished state.

The fiasco begins as soon as you boot up the game: the intro videos and main menu exhibit some very heavy stutters even on high-end systems (our review is based on the version dated 06 December 22, four days after the launch and the first patches). Between the intro videos and the main menu, after the initial start-up, the screen may sometimes go black for such a long period that you might think the game had crashed. What's more, the game did actually crash on us every now and then.

Another thing that is just as annoying: although The Callisto Protocol was created in collaboration with AMD, we noticed some extremely severe flickering when running the game on some AMD-based computers. And this is on top of the already choppy gaming experience with regular (minor) stutters. In a nutshell: the developer still needs to work on the game and improve its technical performance with more patches. We can only recommend that you stay away from the game in its current state.

The game's developer should also look into revising the graphics menu. The menu isn't very user-friendly because it has many sub-menus, most of which contain fairly few options. Whilst you can adjust V-Sync, framerate limit and DirectX mode in the general tab, the resolution, brightness, gamma (incl. HDR support) and a few other settings are found in the display tab. This is followed by a lighting menu that houses various quality and ray-tracing options. Finally, you'll also find an effects tab and an advanced graphics menu.

Note that the game automatically enables FSR upscaling (DLSS isn't supported) when you use one of the four handy presets. We manually disabled FSR for all our measurements. One nice feature is that the game doesn't require a restart every time you change any of the graphics options (except DirectX mode). On the other hand, the menu hardly provides any explanations about what each of the settings does, let alone comparison images.