The Callisto Protocol
Gonna start with the summary this time: I felt like I wasted my money on this game, and I got it for free.
The story was pretty meh, the way it's set up and specially the ending feel like it would have been better as a PvPvE battle royale where you play as a prisoner trying to escape Black Iron while having to fight other prisoners and the monsters and security robots that roam the place.
The melee combat starts out OK, but it doesn't handle multiple enemies well, and completely falls apart for certain boss fights. Ammo is too scarce, specially in the later parts of the game, not in the survival horror resource management kind of way, rather, once the first boss is introduced, the game just spams that same boss several times, with not enough drops in between to properly replenish resources.
Movement is constantly interrupted by areas where you have to squeeze, shimmy or crawl though in order to move forward, at first I thought this was a way to hide loading times, but there was a particularly ridiculous part where it goes shimmy->crawl->shimmy just one after another, for no reason other than to waste time. Some animations also take too long, though this is for the sake of jumpscares (going down a ladder in particular).
The biggest issue, is that it's just not scary, all the creepy scenes, the jumpscares, the monster encounters, none of it is scary or tense, part of it is the gameplay issues, part of it is that everything feels way too predictable, way too by the numbers, so you can tell when and where a jumpscare is going to happen, when an enemy is going to attack, when some creepy sound is going to play, it doesn't take long to figure out its formula and then it loses all tension.
The good: the graphics, everything looks pretty good, the acting and mocap is pretty neat too.
I wouldn't recommend it, unless you really, REALLY want to see what it's all about for yourself, even then, I'd say try and play in that new dismemberment mode, supposedly makes things easier, but it also makes the combat feel better. No achievements in that mode though.
Grade: F