After a few years within the making, Useless House religious successor The Callisto Protocol launched and… wasn’t fairly the slam dunk we had been hoping for. Our evaluation discovered it to be “participating, linear sci-fi survival horror” (opens in new tab), even when fairly demanding, however a much bigger problem was that the sport launched on Steam with extreme stuttering points for a lot of customers (opens in new tab) (now fastened, and which Glen Schofield, CEO of developer Putting Distance Studios, blamed on “freakin error (opens in new tab)“)
Efficiency stuff apart, there’s additionally been a typical theme amongst these on the group who’ve performed it. I cherished Useless House however the sheer oppressiveness of this typically feels a bit a lot and, whereas I get pleasure from a superb grisly dying animation, the protagonist right here actually does get ripped aside in horrifically detailed and gory trend. You could not skip previous these and a few of them genuinely make you wince. It could attain some extent the place, as our Fraser mentioned, they begin to smash the general expertise (opens in new tab).
A brand new patch has streamlined some parts of the sport’s fight system, and added the flexibility to skip the dying animations (critically: a few of these issues really feel like they take minutes). The primary in-game tweak is that therapeutic is now sooner. Jacob heals by jabbing his neck with a stim and the animation at launch was sluggish sufficient that it was laborious to heal mid-fight: which was clearly intentional, however clearly the studio felt they’d been a little bit bit too imply.
Along with this, weapon-switching is now faster. So the final vibe is making fight a tiny bit much less demanding, suggesting numerous gamers had been dying and had perhaps had sufficient of seeing Jacob slowly filleted fifty methods afterwards.
The patch notes do not go into element however learn (opens in new tab): “Search for fight enhancements, efficiency and stability fixes, localization optimizations, and common high quality of life modifications. We’re listening and grateful on your suggestions. Extra to return”. Putting Distance Studios additionally guarantees additional PC-specific optimizations are “within the works”.