PC gamers aren’t happy with Callisto Protocol

The Callisto Protocol has been met with mostly negative reviews on Steam after player complaints of poor performance and “stutters”

The Callisto Protocol was developed by Striking Distance Studios, headed up by Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield. Picture: Striking Distance Studios

The Callisto Protocol released on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation this week, but PC players say the game is currently in an “unacceptable” state.

The game’s store page on Steam, the largest digital games marketplace on PC, has been flooded with negative reviews for the recently-released game, with most complaining about its poor performance. The game has almost 2500 reviews on the platform, and roughly 2000 of those reviews are negative.

Players have complained of what they call a “stutter”, which seems to primarily happen when entering new areas, as new assets load into place. This stutter causes the frame rate to drop significantly for a brief moment, which can be disorienting and jarring for players.

Others have said that they can’t get the game to perform well at all, even on high-end hardware. Players with NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics cards, which were some of 2020’s most expensive and most powerful graphics cards on the market, say they’re struggling to even hit 30 frames per second at times, which is widely considered the minimum for an acceptable gaming experience.

The Callisto Protocol bears more than a passing resemblance to its creator’s other series, Dead Space. Picture: Striking Distance Studios

Some players have blamed the performance issues on Denuvo, an anti-piracy measure included in some games that regularly checks for legitimacy on the hardware level and sometimes affects performance. Others have suggested that the game’s engine, Unreal Engine 4, is to blame, as many PC releases have had similar issues using the same engine.

The Callisto Protocol was developed by Striking Distance Studios, a new studio set up by Glen Schofield, who previously co-created the Dead Space series. The game bears more than a passing resemblance to that series, being a third-person, over-the-shoulder survival horror with heavy sci-fi theming.

The game originally started its life as a spin-off set in the universe of popular online battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds, but ultimately grew beyond that initial premise. The game was also intended to be released in Japan, but was turned down by the country’s classification authority CERO due to violent content that Striking Distance opted not to remove.

The Callisto Protocol is a survival horror game with action shooter elements, according to its developers. Picture: Striking Distance Studios

It’s not the only sci-fi game on the horizon, however. Bethesda’s next game, Starfield, is set to release sometime in the first half of 2023, and Starfield director Todd Howard says he’s feeling “a lot of pressure”. This will be the first major release from Bethesda Game Studios since the publisher was acquired by Microsoft, and Howard says there’s a lot of pressure to make a game that will sell Xbox consoles.

And in an odd, if slightly expected turn of events, the new Far Cry 6 expansion gets weird, taking a deep turn into sci-fi territory too. While Far Cry 6 is a fairly grounded game, its new expansion has players going up against crystal monsters in a mind-bending world.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.