Minor spoilers below.
Ok, Callisto is worthy of some praise. For one, there is very little backtracking like there is in Dead Space. This means you are never bored going through the same shit over and over again like you do in the first DP game and to a lesser extent, DS 2. You are always moving forward and nothing really looks like you are in recycled environments.
Since this game looks outstanding this is a definite plus. It always feels like you are walking through someplace new, with something different to look at. If games were based on presentation alone, CP would be a 10.
The absolute main problem with CP however, isn't that it is clearly a DS clone, its that the consistency of combat is too varying. Especially when it comes to the brute mini bosses, and the final boss. There are too many insta kill triggers featuring those bosses that make them unnecessarily hard. If you are even turned slightly at an angle then both bosses will fire off an insta kill "running away" animation if you are too close, even if you successfully dodged. That is super f**king annoying. Also, the darkness added to some of the boss fights are just there to try and make the encounters much more difficult. You can hear the big mofos coming at you, but often times you can't see them until they are right up on you. It doesn't come across os new or fresh, just makes the game feel like they did all they could to make the total lack of bosses unnecessarily hard by putting you in arenas you can't see in.
There are also some things that rigger scripted waves with regular enemies that can make the game way harder. In the oldtown portion of the game, I snuck around and was supposed to activate an elevator. I yeeted the enemies into spike walls and activated the elevator. As I was leaving I hit some kind of trigger, and it was clear it was scripted because one of the blind enemies ran along a beam and jumped down to my level, I was swarmed over and killed. I did the exact same thing the next time, except I new a wave was coming, and readied weapons. When I flipped the switch expecting to be attacked nothing at all happened. This kind of invisible trigger happened more than once.
No new game plus. That is absolute amateur hour. They are adding one in february, but c'mon dude. That is like a horror survival game standard. You are supposed to reward survival horror fans that stuck through your game and played it through the end with NG+ as a reward.
I don't blame games for this, but CP goes kind of old skool on what it doesn't tell you. YOU MUST CONTINUE TO USE MELEE/DODGE mechanic throughout the game. You will never beat the minibosses or the final bosses first stages without doing it. You can either waste all your ammunition on the minibosses, or you can stand right in front of them and dodge their attacks and melee them when they are in their recovery animation and use a quarter of the ammo you would use. This mechanic has caused many people to quit the game just because they got to the point where it was easier to use upgraded weapons and GRP over melee, and for too long didn't melee on that initial game mechanic and forgot about it.
Duhamel and The Boys girl were ok, but not given anything really substantial to work with. The story is very basic bare bones horror scifi stuff with a twist that was about equally impactful as the twist in OG DS. You could kind of see both coming from a mile away.
So, in short, OUTSTANDING presentation. No fetchquest through already explored areas like the OG deadspace that hurt the flow of the game marred by unnecessarily difficult boss fights, that they tilt the favor to the bosses to try and make it harder than it should. However, the boss fights aren't hard gameplay wise, the game often time glitches you in encounters with them. I've dodged with a perfect slow motion animation, only to immediately be thrown into an insta death animation because of the way the previous animation left me standing in front of the boss. The darkening of the stages to increase tension only actually increases aggravation. I probably spent an eighth of the game on the midboss/boss fights.
No new game plus mode just feels basic. It has been a standard of horror games since the OG deadspace era. The way the game is set up now is that you will never be able to level up your late game weapons because after you finish the game you have to start over again. This will be rectified in February, but SHOULD HAVE BEEN a standard game release feature.
6.5/10. Not complete dogshit, but no DS2 either.
