Flawed PC ports re-tested: The Callisto Protocol, Dead Space, Returnal and Forspoken

2022 and now 2023 have been rough years for AAA game release quality, with many games releasing in an unfinished, broken state – particularly on PC. We recently reported on big improvements to The Last of Us Part 1 on PC, so we decided to go back, revisiting four of the most contentious releases we’ve reviewed recently. How long does it take to fix a PC game? Do they actually get fixed at all? Of course, the truth is that the situation is different on a game by game basis. Some games have only had minor tweaks, and of the four we tested, only one has addressed the foundational problems we highlighted in our initial review.

The results of our investigation are found in the video embedded below, but Dead Space, Returnal and Forspoken came under the microscope – and I began by taking a look at The Callisto Protocol. This launched with astonishingly bad shader compilation stutter, which was quickly addressed.

However, other problems remain as they were. The options menu remains confusingly hyper-nested, with menus within menus and options that cannot be changed in real-time, meaning you need to restart the game to see the difference. This essentially makes settings optimisation impossible unless you have a photographic memory, or a capture card.

Other issues remain untouched. There’s still no DLSS or XeSS support – only FSR2 – which is unacceptable when the quality of the implementation isn’t good enough and the underlying Unreal Engine 4 technology has full support for all of those upscalers. Major stuttering problems traversing between different areas also remains problematic, the effect amplified with ray tracing features active.