Single player, story driven shooters like this are increasingly rare these days, so it makes my mustache stand up straight whenever a game like Metal Eden drops, and it doesn’t waste your time with live service slop or bloated open worlds. If that's what you’ve been starved for as well, you'll be eating good with this game.

To get my one complaint out of the way: while the lore is intriguing, the game's story unfolds through cryptic dialogue and vague exposition, which never really pulled me in. The dialogue especially waxes philosophical till your eyes roll, but it's not really saying anything of substance most of the time. The themes are there, and they do come across through visuals and occasional info dumps, but I never found myself caring much about what was happening. The main character is a wash too, because you do get some glimpses and hints about her backstory, and I wanted more of that. But it's simply not explored enough for any emotional beats to land for me.

Luckily, it's not that big of a deal because story is the least important reason to play this game anyway. The main selling point is the gameplay and the audiovisual spectacle. The combat borrows liberally from games such as Doom 2016, pairs it with Titanfall 2's platforming, and wraps everything in a stylish cyberpunk/sci-fi aesthetic. It's tightly paced, it's polished, it flows well, and if you liked RUINER, you'll feel right at home. Even if Metal Eden's combat is less punishing, which can be simultaneously a pro or a con, depending on your expectations.

So... the game is a lil janky. There are moderately frequent instances where:
- AI politely stands around the corner and waits for me to stick my gun out and blast it in the face
- Dead enemies ragdoll so spectacularly you'd think they have rocket boots
- My arms get stuck on level geometry until my butterfingers drop the gun and it disappears into the backrooms
- My arm swings either toss the grenade into the next country over, or I drop it at my feet
- other funky things like that happen.

But you know what? This is the kind of jank that makes the game only more charming, especially with a CoD-like campaign that takes itself so seriously. And this is exactly why I was so excited to see it finally drop on PC because I'd rather go off the grid and live in the woods than to funnel more money into Mark Zuckerberg's future plans for uncanny valley cyber dystopia, by a way of a 20 dollar Meta Store purchase.

Anyway, good stuff. Now grab it, because what else you're gonna play in this desolate wasteland that is the PCVR?

The Callisto Protocol is a game about a man who befriends cute Japanese waifu and they embark together on a journey of self-discovery. At least that's what I gathered from it. The plot really isn't that important anyway, to be honest. The game's a mood piece where the plot is wallpaper and you're supposed to immerse yourself in the horror atmosphere and the environmental storytelling, more so than experiencing a compelling story. What helps to sell it though, is almost Naughty Dog level of cinematic direction, the performance capture, and the inclusion of kino actors. What disappoints is a very limited amount of backstory for this setting and lack of sufficient explanation behind some of the key plot twists.

The game didn't blow my balls off but it was pretty solid. I find that most people simply do not understand what the word "janky" means when describing the combat. A more fitting word here would be "shallow" because by itself, the melee combat requires practically zero skill. The enemies telegraph their attacks from orbit, the timing window for dodging is wider than an interstate, and it's far too easy to dispatch even the toughest enemies, provided that you don't mess it up due to panic or just general lack of elite gamer dexterity (like mine). The real challenge of this game lies in crowd control. It's not impossible to fight more than one enemy, using medkits isn't broken, and you get no invincibility frames for a reason. You just need to understand that this isn't Dead Space, and the method to handling the combat is very different.

And sure, all of these design choices may send you on a fast lane towards rage town but none of them are janky. Just deliberate. Which seems to be the entire ethos this game's built upon. Right down to your character movements requiring realistic momentum to wind up and wind down, or feeling the pull of inertia with every turn. Every movement in this game has weight. None of it is "janky" either, at least not in my experience. The animations were smooth, the weapons made contact where they should, and none of the physics or camera work ever spazzed out on me. In fact, from a purely technical standpoint - the visuals, the quality of animations, the sound - it is spectacular, and unlike anything I've seen before or since. Every game you've ever played inevitably ends up looking like a video game once you start pushing buttons, but The Callisto Protocol might be the closest we've ever gotten to a video game that not only looks like a bleeding edge CGI movie in cutscenes, but also animates like one in gameplay... mostly. So it's no wonder that the combat would follow that philosophy, and feel a bit sluggish and messy, but weighty and deliberate. That sense of physicality defines the whole game, like it was built around the idea of controlling a real, fragile person in a tactile environment, rather than serving you another power fantasy.

Going into this expecting Dead Space is just setting yourself up for disappointment, because while the game does share a lot of Dead Space's DNA in its presentation and storytelling, gameplay wise it's a completely different beast. It's not by any means bad, but you can easily see how, ironically, the strict adherence to photo-realism holds the game back from being more immersive for the player. The game is a fantastic audio and visual spectacle and when I was focused on exploration and atmosphere, it was amazing. But every time I got into combat or wandered off into an obvious side corridor with some extra loot, I never stopped thinking how great it would be if there was more depth to all of it. That the exploration would work so much better with just a few extra corridors to sidestep into, or how combat would be so much better if the dodge timing windows were tightened and melee expanded with more combos or special moves. It doesn't make the current experience terrible, and I'm sure there are many people who will have a blast with this game. But to me, a horror game where combat is almost trivial and feels very repetitive, kinda deflates the tension that the atmosphere and presentation are setting you up for.

But maybe I'm just being too harsh because, at the end of the day, I had a great time playing this one. It was actually a very welcome throwback to the PS3/X360 era of gaming, where the story mode was straightforward, didn't drag on longer than necessary, and provided an experience with some risky but unique gameplay gimmicks that helped it stand out from the competition. And in today's gaming market, which is overcrowded with homogeneous open world games plagued by never-ending content bloat, something like The Callisto Protocol sticks out even more and is a welcome change of pace. It's not really a horror masterpiece, but it's one of the very few games in the triple-A space today that were bold enough to try some new ideas, even if they landed a bit awkwardly.