The Callisto Protocol was going to be one of the year's capstone games, and instead it turned out to be one of this year's biggest flops. At the core of Callisto Protocol's problems are technical issues described charitably as a "completely unoptimized mess." Performance is poor even on current-gen consoles and cutting-edge PC hardware, with the largest of those issues being constant stuttering. FSR2 doesn't help, DLSS is unsupported, and even having a brand-new RTX 4080 doesn't improve the jerky camera. Many fans that pre-ordered the game were calling for their money back, and game director Glen Schofield put the problems down to "a wrong file was patched" due to "just [a] freakin' error by someone rushing." A PC patch was released late Friday evening to solve the stuttering, while consoles had to wait until Sunday morning for their patch, which additionally fixes frame rate and crash issues players have reported.Related: The Callisto Protocol Represents Modern Gaming's Hubris"We are listening, working hard on updates, and will have details to share on more upcoming improvements early this week," wrote the official Callisto Protocol Twitter account. It later clarified some issues on ray-traced shadows, which are supported on Xbox Series X, but ray-traced reflections aren't working properly. You can add that to HDR, which is similarly broken.

"We hear you," added Schofield. "As we say in the tweet, we will communicate and keep you all updated. We want you to play the game as intended."

Even without the technical problems, playing the game "as intended" didn't seem all that great according to our own Andrew King. "Though it looks gorgeous on the surface, a dozen hours of nothing special can have a clarifying effect," wrote King in his review. "Like a monstrous two-headed enemy banging Jacob's head into the ground until it collapses, the game's tedium forces you to reckon with the fact that there just isn't much once the facade splatters away."

Ironically, the best way to experience The Callisto Protocol at the moment might be a fan-made PS1-style demake that has somehow already popped up.

Next: The Callisto Protocol Somehow Has A More Boring Protagonist Than Ethan Winters