Control is a game I think is really special, despite acknowledging its flaws. It can be a strange feeling loving a game while also knowing there are parts of it that make it frustrating to revisit. The outstanding worldbuilding, exploration, and gamefeel make up for combat encounters that frequently go on too long, with enemies that feel overly spongy in a way that can make the excellent gunplay feel a bit tedious at the worst of times. While the main quest didn’t have the strongest narrative weight, the tour of the Oldest House it took you on was well worth it, with some of the best side quest writing I’ve seen in ages. Every overlong gunfight that I lost at the last second and had to redo from the start was balanced out by wonderful discoveries like an area covered in sticky notes or a trip to the dream-logic Oceanview Motel.
The world was so compelling that it became the cornerstone of Remedy’s brand. They incorporated it into their cult classic Alan Wake franchise, making it a key part of the long awaited sequel. They released FBC: Firebreak, a co-op shooter that casts you as an emergency response team dealing with continuing issues in the Oldest House. Most importantly, the full-fledged sequel Control Resonant is now upon us, and it’s anything but a comfortable retread of the first game’s successes. Remedy has changed location, protagonist, and even combat style for their follow-up, but from the trailers it was clear that it still retained the brand of quirky humor and surreal weirdness that made the original so memorable. What remained to be seen was the new melee focus, something that Remedy has never attempted in their long history, would help or hinder combat encounters.
For those unfamiliar with Control (there’s a recap video that can be watched from the main menu if this applies to you), the series is focused on a shadowy government agency called the Federal Bureau of Control that investigates paranatural events. They secure and research various objects of power, while also dealing with entities or people that have extraordinary abilities. In the first one, you played as Jesse Faden, who enters the Oldest House, the ever shifting headquarters of the FBC, who is searching for her brother Dylan who vanished after an anomalous incident when they were young. Audiences latched on to the SCP-style tone of the game’s world as well as its unique and striking brutalist architecture, making it their fastest-selling IP since Max Payne.
The story of Control Resonant picks up seven years after the events of the original Control. This time, you play as Dylan, who is awakened from his coma when his sister jams the Aberrant, a shapeshifting weapon he’ll use throughout the game, straight into his chest. As he stumbles out of his cell in the Oldest House, he finds that not only has the lockdown been breached, allowing the Hiss, the antagonistic force that’s menaced the Federal Bureau of Control since the first game, to escape containment, but the surrounding area of Manhattan has been affected by a new paranatural event known as the Pattern, which has warped the city streets into something out of Inception.
Dylan, who has been subjected to FBC experiments for most of his life, is reluctantly recruited by the agency to help out with the situation, but is kept under close watch due to his previous Hiss infection. While in the first game he was mostly a blank slate of a character, acting as both Jesse’s goal and antagonist, Resonant manages to give him a depth that even Jesse lacked.
Designated as a powerful paranatural from a young age, the bureau attempted to harness his power for their own purposes, making him volatile and dangerous. Control Resonant uses this to the story’s advantage, allowing him to quickly become such an interesting character, searching both for redemption and a sense of self that he never was allowed to develop as a child. Several sequences dive into his character and his past, allowing us to not only understand him, but also come to a deeper understanding of Jesse as well.
Since he’s working with the FBC on the Manhattan crisis, Dylan is paired with Zoe De Vera, an agent that acts as his primary radio contact. Much like Remedy itself, Zoe has a love of music that is a big part of her personality, which is used to add impact to some of the game’s most memorable moments. Their relationship evolves throughout the course of the campaign, and I found it to be a surprisingly emotional friendship that anchors the heart of the game. She’s contrasted by Simon Arish, a no-nonsense hardass who views Dylan as a disposable weapon to be pointed at whatever the FBC needs to destroy. While he starts out a bit one-note, the journey he goes on adds more compelling wrinkles to his personality.
For fans of the original, we have a few returning characters, including Emily Pope, who has risen in the ranks following Jesse’s disappearance at the beginning of the game. Her performance is great, with real humanity coming through as she tries to parse the strangeness surrounding her. Dr Casper Darling gets some great sequences, presented in live action video as Remedy loves to do, filling in not only his past but Dylan’s as well.
In a surprise move, you’re often given dialogue choices when responding to people, either in-person or over the radio. These don’t have big, Telltale-style branching narrative choices, but instead just allow you to figure out what type of character your Dylan is. All of the options sound in-line with how he’s written, but it gives you a chance to dictate where you feel he is on his path of redemption and how he would feel at the moment. It’s not a huge part of the game, and can make things slightly clunky when trying to respond during action or exploration, but it’s neat to see Remedy experimenting with ways to make their stories more personal to the player.
Bringing you outside of the Oldest House is not only a stylistic difference from the first game, but also a structural one. Manhattan is a dense open world for you to explore, with discrete zones that all have their own personality. You start the game with double jump, hover, and dash abilities that make getting around a blast, and it only gets more fun as your mobility suite expands throughout the course of the game.
Part of the fun of the game becomes treating navigation like a puzzle. Many times you’ll look at your map and see you’re close to your objective, but you need to read the environment to try to figure out exactly how to make your way there. In addition to having side quests scattered around the zones, you’ll also have more traditional levels that you’ll enter, like subway systems or buildings, that will break up the exploration and put your more on a linear path. The world never feels too expansive, and there’s a healthy spread of fast travel points, in the form of free standing doors, scattered around the map, making it so you never have to struggle to get from one side of the world to another.
There are three main things that you’re chasing down to progress the narrative: story missions, Resonants, and Faults. Story missions are self-explanatory; these are the bigger missions given to you by the FBC to help try to solve the Pattern and put an end to its stranglehold on Manhattan. Control Resonant’s narrative feels better paced than the first one, with a very clear emergency that felt like it had more forward momentum to keep you engaged. Many of the game’s most memorable moments come from these missions, such as a dramatic escape from a place known as “the Sinkhole” or following a research team through several fractured timelines.
The Resonants are bosses that are scattered around the map, usually behind quests or levels that lead you to locating them. They are not on the main path, but defeating them will allow you to choose between a pair of combat abilities to add to your set of powers. Resonants are all gorgeously designed, either as staggering monstrosities or warped humans, and provide some of the best fights in the game. My favorite was the Dancer, who not only had the most fun patterns and attacks to learn, but was also an audio-visual feast from start to finish. While some of them are optional, it’s definitely worth tracking them down, as they are valuable for both the powerful rewards and the gameplay experience.
Faults are cracks in the world that Jesse has been exploring in order to do a ritual that will hopefully fix the Pattern once and for all. Indicated by the same strange FMV overlay that was used for Director Trench in the last game, you’ll need to seek these out in order to help her on her quest, while also saving her from the disastrous consequences of it. These sections of the game are almost exclusively platforming-based and reward you with new traversal powers, making the most fun part of the game even more entertaining.
While I loved the feeling of moving through these sections, they were most important for the interactions between Jesse and Dylan that drove them forward. The two characters have such a strong dynamic that brings to light their shared family history with sharp details, deepening the emotional core of the game in ways that surprised me. There’s a great little bit with them reminiscing about a video game, “Severed Circle 2”, they used to play when they were young that just makes the relationship feel so much more lived in and believable than in the first game. Faults are a perfect synthesis of gameplay and narrative, highlighting Remedy’s greatest assets.
Aside from the open world structure, the biggest shift in gameplay is the combat, which is now focused on melee weapons instead of firearms. Your basic combat kit has three components, your standard weapon that does your light attack, a stronger form that’s for your heavy attack, and a combo finisher which will happen after a series of light attacks. Each of them has their own stats and utility, and they can be mixed and matched to your liking. For most of the game, I was rocking the sweeping scythe attack for my light, which had a wider swing, along with a huge, slow hammer for my heavy attack, and an uppercut finisher that popped enemies into the air, taking advantage of the generous amount of air juggling you’re able to do thanks to Dylan’s floating power.
In addition, you slowly accumulate a set of abilities that run on a power meter that’s recharged by your melee attacks. As I mentioned before, Resonants will supply you with new options for your arsenal, and the choices you make will greatly affect your build. Options include summonable minions, powerful projectiles, or fiery enhancements to your weapons. All of these abilities have their usefulness, making the choices feel significant to your playstyle. The mix of abilities and standard attacks also creates a nice rhythm for the combat, forcing you to engage with the standard attacks to build your meter for the powers.
Like many modern action games, enemies have both a health bar and a falter bar, and figuring out how to affect each of them is important to victory. Filling up their falter meter will make them vulnerable to an execution, which gives you a brief burst of power that can easily turn the tide of an encounter. Unlike most modern action games, you do not have a parry button, only allowing you to dash out of the way if you want to avoid damage.
The feel of the combat is solid and satisfying, but I once again think that the encounters don’t really live up to it. Any time you run into a fight, the enemies are broken down into two types. There are small drones that won’t be terribly tough to deal with but will continue to respawn, and there are heavy creatures that are much more challenging, and need to be defeated to bring the encounter to a close. This structure feels a bit like the modern DOOM games, especially given that health is only recovered by picking up power-ups that drop from defeated foes, but it doesn’t work quite as well in Control Resonant.
The main problem I have is that enemies feel like they have too many hitpoints. Enemies do have levels based on where or when you encounter them, but even when you are evenly matched they still feel like they take a bit too long to kill. Combined with the fact that there are so many enemies at any given time, shooting at you from all directions, it makes many encounters feel tedious. I found myself standing in one place, slashing a heavy enemy over and over again while doing my best to not be pelted to death by projectiles coming from everyone around me. This type of structure would work better in a shooter, where you can constantly be in motion while chipping away at their health, but given that I need to hit them in melee range, it becomes a lot of button tapping at a certain point. The feeling is compounded by the fact that encounters themselves are also a bit too long, making many of the later game fights feel like a chore.
Fortunately, Remedy has done an excellent job with the accessibility options it presents in the game, allowing you to tweak a plethora of settings to customize the difficulty in very specific ways. If you’re like me and find the enemies feeling too spongy, you can go in and adjust the amount of outgoing damage you do with your attacks. Feel like you’re constantly dying because you’re being hit from all sides? Go ahead and tune down the incoming damage you take. Falter build up, power regeneration, enemy aggression and more can all be changed to your liking, allowing you to customize your experience to ensure you’re still having fun.
Since there are multiple paranatural threats loose in Manhattan, there are various subsets of enemies that all have different strategies to deal with them. The Hiss are the most common enemy type, with mechanics like regenerating shields to deal with, while the Mold were my favorite, with a resistance to blunt damage but a weakness to fire. Unlike the first game, which mostly had possessed humans for enemies, the creature design in Control Resonant is more exaggerated, often featuring huge monsters that have no semblance of humanity left in them. Towering bipedal beasts with hammer-like heads and horrible winged monsters that shoot laser beams are mixed in with mutated humans, providing some great visual variety to the encounters. I wish there were a few more enemy types, as given how encounter-dense the game is they run out of new tricks long before the end of the game, but I found them all visually unique and easy to read in the heat of battle.
To keep up with the escalating power of the enemies, you have access to several skill trees to enhance Dylan’s combat abilities. Each part of your arsenal has its own upgrade path that can be enhanced alongside a more generalized skill tree that affects everything you do. Obviously, there are some standard “do X percent more damage” options that aren’t as interesting, but many of them do change up how you play a bit. I really enjoyed a skill that allowed me to do extra damage when attacking from behind, which coupled well with my summons that could draw enemy attention. You can also craft artifacts that can be equipped into one of three slots, which further modify your stats in specific ways.
While I did like slowly watching my skills grow, there’s a bit of fiddliness with the process, as just like in Control, there are a ton of currencies that you use to do this. I appreciate the flavor that comes with using things like Living Shards or Warped Resonance as upgrade materials, but it felt like I spent a lot of time at vendors buying specific resources with the generic currency, when it probably would have been better if it was more streamlined. That said, I love the Remedy touch of forcing you to go into a strange liminal space called the Gap to interact with various stone structures to perform said upgrades, rather than just having it all run straight through a menu.
It’s these Remedy touches that really make the game shine, even when getting frustrated with overlong combat encounters that don’t offer much variety. For every fight that I found myself grumbling at, it would be offset by stumbling on a clever puzzle that hid intriguing lore notes. If you liked the dream logic style of puzzles featured in the original game’s Oceanview Motel as much as I did, you’ll find yourself frequently rewarded for your exploration.
Aside from the side quests, which are always a surreal pleasure to chase down, there are plenty of collectibles scattered throughout that make exploring rewarding. On top of that, doing quests and discovering collectibles will help you level up a zone, providing you extra bonus for that particular area, giving you a sense that the world is being helped through your actions. This sense of improving the area helps thematically reinforce the idea of Dylan’s path of redemption, finally finding a way to use the powers to help rather than hurt.
Near the end of the game, I took some time to go back through areas and sweep for secrets, and it’s some of the best time that I had. With the full set of movement powers, it feels like getting around an open world superhero game, allowing you to appreciate the world that Remedy has crafted. The gravity shift in particular, which allows you to shift which direction you’re oriented, allowed the developers to create some mind-bending spaces that feel satisfying to explore. In later areas, I found myself constantly in awe of how they were able to not only fold space on itself to create complex layouts, but also of how effectively they were able to invisibly lead me through these areas, making navigation feel like a puzzle that I was being elegantly guided through.
When I think back on my nearly 30 hours with Control Resonant, it’s not the friction with the combat encounters that pops into my head. It’s sense of discovery and exploration provided by exhilarating traversal abilities. It’s the surreal visuals I’m being led through by an engaging narrative. It’s the compelling characters and relationships that breathe life into the delightfully strange world. It’s a testament to the strength of the game that no matter how much I was sighing at yet another encounter that I had to button mashing my way through, I still fell in love with everything the game was doing. Control Resonant’s narrative, characters, and worldbuilding are top of class and not to be missed, and if you find yourself like me, bristling at some of the combat repetition, it’s incredibly easy to use the accessibility tools to create an experience that makes the melee combat work for you.
Review code provided by publisher.
Control Resonant launches September 24 digitally for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, while physical editions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series will be available from October 15.