GRP energy is finite, but like the ammo reserves for Callisto's five ranged weapons (all standard fare, with hard-hitting upgrade paths), I never found myself desperately wanting for resources on medium difficulty.

I don't find The Callisto Protocol's excessive approach to gore very interesting or shocking-just gross, really-but thankfully it doesn't lean on blood and guts at the expense of setting an utterly grim atmosphere. Once I learned to go into every combat situation alert to environmental hazards to turn into weapons, this approach to combat clicked. Finding myself overwhelmed by one particular encounter, I turned to the GRP and, yes: simply picking the bastards up and tossing them to their deaths turned out to be far more expedient. I continued to bash away at baddies with my baton. After receiving the GRP, I forgot I had it for a while. This addition of a 'delete enemy' button to survival horror is disorientating at first, but The Callisto Protocol gradually compensates for it. Or, you can pick up nearby explosives and toss them at your foes, which is less fun, but more sensible because picking up objects uses less energy than levitating mutants. Boy, does this moon colony have an alarming amount of wall-mounted spikes.

In a game full of spongey baddies, this weapon lets you pick most of them up and toss them off platforms and into chasms, or more frequently, into wall-mounted spikes. The GRP is The Callisto Protocol's answer to Control's levitate, or Half-Life 2's gravity gun, and it's great fun. Lee has a glowing green bar on the back of his head that indicates his health, and a blue one that indicates whether his 'GRP' has overheated. When it comes to the actual bludgeoning though, it's satisfyingly vicious, especially when broken up with point-blank shotgun rounds. Perhaps I'm just bad at it, but in the heat of the moment-and especially when coping with more than one enemy-I often resorted to panic-shooting. The Callisto Protocol takes a rhythmic approach to hand-to-hand combat, but playing with a controller, over the course of 15 hours I never felt like I could effectively nail the timing of that ostensibly simple evasion system.

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