"Callisto Protocol" proved to be a surprisingly controversial release. Opinions are divided on many points, including the combat, the endless death animations, and the scenarios. Our own Sean saw the problems as well as the positives and gave The Callisto Protocol a 79 in his review (opens in new tab). What many agree on, however, is that the PC version of the release sucks. Difficult.

At the time of this writing, Steam (opens in new tab) has 26% positive reviews, but earlier in the day it had dropped to 22%. This seems cruel, and to some extent it may be, but performance issues are making this game nearly unplayable for many. The biggest culprit is stuttering, which we noted in the performance aspect of our review. It mostly occurs when loading into a new area or during one of the cutscenes or animations. Unfortunately, the latter two are present throughout the majority of The Callisto Protocol, so the poor performance is quite noticeable."

Some Steam reviewers have jokingly called the game "The Stuttering Protocol," while several others have called it "a mess." Some people who own RTX 30-series GPUs, and some 40-series GPUs but even with ray tracing turned off, stuttering and frame drops are common. Especially with Unreal Engine 4, the engine of choice for The Callisto Protocol, it seems to be thanks to shader compilation, a common cause of stutter.

It's a real shame that it looked so bad at launch. I'm not much of a horror fan, but I was hooked when I saw the preview at gamescom, and my expectations for the spiritual successor to Dead Space were high. So far, Striking Distance has not acknowledged the problems faced by PC users; the number of reviews on Steam continues to grow, and thankfully for the developers, the percentage of positive reviews seems to be steadily increasing, so not all players are having such big problems! It seems that not all players are having such major problems. Nevertheless, for now, Steam still enjoys a "mostly negative" rating, and until a performance patch is released, this rating is unlikely to change.