So, I don't need to tell you that Control has a good setting. If you've watched one trailer or played 5 minutes of the game, it's probably the thing that's stood out and if it isn't, i'd have to wonder what the hell is standing out to you, because after 15-odd hours of messing about in the federal bureau of control, I'm pretty tempted to take a big shit on pretty much everything else the game has to offer.

Okay, maybe that's a little unfair. The game is mostly competent. I'm not going to talk about the setting much in this review because dozens of much more talented people than me have all written their thinkpieces on it - it's great - and that's not it. The visuals, when they finally get up past 20fps, are great and fairly unique as far as i've played, particularly when it comes to the particle effects and post-processing. The game looks truly unique at times, which isn't something i can say of many AAA ventures. The combat has a lot of good building blocks, with the force throw ability being fun throughout, and remedy's traditionally great gun impact and effects.

To begin with, it all seems fine and dandy. The gameplay is nothing amazing but it's ok and it's going to get better, right? As they introduce more weapons and abilities in cool ways at a strong pace that keep the combat interesting and varied, along with more enemy variety and an intriguing story that will keep me hooked throughout!

Oh. Wait.

So, first things first, the plot is kinda trash. The plot feels crowbared into the setting from the beginning and never gets anywhere close approaching good. The world, and the little stories you encounter throughout the narrative on sheets of paper - they are compelling, but the actual plot consists of little more than doing busywork and fetchquests for nearly the majority of the game, and in the interests of just avoiding spoilers, i'll say it doesn't get any better by the end. It's damn near shameless at points, like the game can't find a good reason to get you to explore a cool piece of concept art some guy at remedy drew, so they just put a macguffin there that contributes nothing to the plot.

If the combat was good, I could excuse it a little - and it's not that bad. The strong visual design and the weapons themselves, along with the force throw ability, go a long way to making combat satisfying and if it was a bit more fleshed out, they could almost hold the game up on their own. There's unfortunately very little depth to these due to the energy system, hitscan enemies and little in the way of useful defensive options, so it ends up a matter of spamming abilities whilst your weapon recharges or vice versa, maybe with a slight element of "prioritise the enemy with the biggest gun".

If this had been followed up with a good progression of weapons and abilities, you'd be looking at 3, maybe even 4 star review here. But oh boy, does the progression take an absolute dive.

First off - the abilities you get after Launch are all terrible. Shield is so useless it feels like a joke, it basically does nothing but waste your time as you have no offensive options whilst using it and health doesnt regenerate, Evade is mostly invalidated by simply sprinting and enemies firing unreactable projectiles, Seize is incredibly linear and should be constantly be used because enemies will magically miss you whilst you use it, and Levitate has very limited application in combat. And the fact that the middle 3 of these are all optional means the game never builds encounters or interesting enemies that interact with shield, evade or seize. Not that I think they would have done that.

Weapon progression somehow comes out of this even worse. Not only can you inexplicably only use two weapons at a time, that share the same energy reserve so there's nothing to be gained in switching 90% of the time, but the way you get these weapons - through crafting using area-specific components - is so ill-concieved it feels like an executive meddled and forced RPG mechanics on the game. From a gameplay and narrative standpoint, it makes no sense for new weapons (and mods) to be crafted and it kills the pacing of gaining new weapons. I was fairly thorough with exploration and played most of the game using two weapons - because there's never a good reason to switch and it's an absolute chore to make others so why fucking bother.

Add on a good old pointless skill point system that basically does nothing, rubbish quest design that boils down to "kill this in x spot/recover x item/do menial work", and by the midway point Control completely ran out of steam for me.

When novelty wore off the setting and the issues began to take root, something else - be it story or gameplay, had to take up that slack, and nothing did. And the thing that annoys me most is that I feel these faults are blatantly obvious. Surely someone noticed weapon crafting was dumb and hurt the game, that the enemy variety was lacking and that the RPG systems did nothing for the game. If no one at Remedy noticed that the shield ability is quite possibly the most worthless ability in any action game ever, I want to have what they're smoking.

In the end, I just Control more frustrating than purely bad. Remedy have made some great games, and the setting and visuals in Control are downright unparallelled at times. So when everything else just fails to fall into place so obviously - what's left is utterly dissapointing.

That said, I think someone with less time in 3rd person shooters and more time in the SCP wiki could enjoy this game a lot more than i did. And I think for a lot of people the sheer wonder and strangeness of the setting will carry it further than it did for me. Maybe even to the end of the runtime. And if you can find it cheap, I would reccomend picking up this game if only for that setting.

Just maybe put it down before those mediocre bits pull down the whole thing.

This was one of those games I had a passing interest in. What finally pushed me over the fence into actually buying it was the Stupendium rap video about it, if you believe that or not.

The game is sort of set up as SPC: The Game. I was never a huge follower of the SPC stuff, I threw my hat in with cryptozoology, but I’ve watched the occasional video about them. This game starts off real strong setting the tone with that brand of oddity SPCs inhabit. You wander around this desolate office building with weird, but subtle, things happening. Unfortunately, it is hard for a game to maintain that tone forever because gameplay has to happen at some point. The cursed SPC objects you come across aren’t that crazy unique, again because this is a game. I’m sure Remedy could’ve made some real odd SPCs, you get to read about plenty of them in the redacted case files, but the ones you encounter have to serve a gameplay purpose, so they do normal things like levitate or mind control. It takes away the mystique of these cursed objects and just makes them upgrade points. The big bad of the game is an evil SPC mist from another dimension that can ‘corrupt’ people. It never gets explained completely, which is fine, but the game flirts with trying to explain it at several points that it just aggravated me we never get a definite answer.

The one, kinda weird thing I enjoyed was the Oceanview Motel. You would get transported to it occasionally and it served as an extra dimensional hallway to reach certain areas. It’s a low rent motel with only four doors that anyone can open, well the magic janitor can open the janitor’s closet too. The notes you collect on it mention how no one can locate it on a map and a team was sent to NV to search for it. Inside the walls are plastered with posters saying “Visit NY” “Come to Texas” “Check out Oregon”, and it’s a neat little detail to sell me on this motel being sort of everywhere at once.

The combat in this game is a mixed bag. You have a selection of telekinetic powers you unlock as you progress and new enemy types being introduced that keep combat varied and fun, but towards the end it felt like there was a steep difficulty curve. Even with take a few ranks of health upgrades, you can usually only take one or two shots from all but the basic enemies. A little challenge is fine and I didn’t mind most combat encounters but the last two in the game are just sort of a zerg rush. You are bombarded with every type of enemy and the checkpoint system is stingy. On top of having to play a large chunk of the fight each time you die, the load times in between deaths are long. Combat is based on moving and shooting. When you get in those fights where you are surrounded by powerful enemies on all sides, running and gunning gets dangerous. There were times I would dodge out of the way of one baddie only to get wiped out by another one from behind that I couldn’t see. And bad guys just warp in at any location, so you can’t keep tabs on where new baddies may be coming from. Still, with some patience and luck, I was able to get through them all. And it was fun using the telekinetic throwing power to launch chunks of concrete at dudes.

The story is another mixed bag. You play as Jesse, a girl who showed up at the seemingly abandoned Bureau of Control for a job interview and ends up as the Bureau’s director. The office is on lockdown due to the evil mist infestation, and it’s your job to figure this all out. After that, you finally meet some people and get the low down on everything. There’s a janitor who can read minds and Jesse never remarks on it, at all! The story seems to stall from that point on. There’s still other plot points, like the previous head of research handing out anti-mist devices, Hedrons, then seemingly disappearing and Jesse is there to find her brother that was captured when they were young.
For a game about the odd and arcane, the story plays it pretty straight. There’s little hints of plot twists peppered throughout the story that never get acted on. You find your brother, Dylan, and he’s gone a little crazy. He mentions how Jesse and Dylan can both be boy or girl names, and I’m thinking the twist is one of us isn’t real, or go Bioshock and we are actually lab babies with false childhood memories. No, Jesse’s memories of events are right. Spoiler blur time, turns out the previous director, who’s ghost has been directing you around, let in the evil mist because he thought the Hedron devices were evil, and I was figuring the rug pull would be that the old director was right and we’ve been acting as a force of evil the whole game, but no. Jesse also has an invisible force that speak to her, ala Beyond Two Souls. At first, I thought the game was doing the self-aware thing where Jesse realized she was in a game and was speaking to us, but then we learn it’s just her imaginary friend. I was expecting a psychological thriller like this to be a little more twisty than it was. You end the game by shutting off the projector that was letting the evil mist in, but it’s all very anti-climactic.

The game’s music goes for a minimalist techno vibe. It is not meant to be a tentpole here, just a little seasoning on everything else. The graphics are good, almost too good. A lot of the people in this game live right in the middle of the uncanny valley. The building you explore is pretty neat though and watching the effect of the corrupt areas returning to normal is pretty neat. The game also has a little cinematic flair, the cutscenes are well shot and a stylized impact banner pops up when you enter a new area.

All in all, this is a game of almosts. There’s some ideas here that, if compounded upon, could’ve made a unique game. Remedy just stopped short of the finish line. Still if you don’t mind average combat and enjoy SCP style stuff, I would recommend this.

Without a doubt Control oozes an atmosphere built on the back of pulp detective and mystery mags, paranormal conspiracy stories and the legacy of the X-Files and everything it represents. The game is a pulp masterpiece that leans heavily into the same tropes that are used to construct its atmosphere. The characterizations are campy and awkward, forced dialogue that perfectly matched the aesthetic of the world. Every character is completely transparent yet simultaneously a mystery, Jesse included. Every character portrayal is a stereotype of the role each person plays at the Federal Bureau of Control, yet all feel surprisingly real. Control is filled with these types of contradictions, an address to both the low and the high in fiction, in art and in life. Control is perfect.

Yet it is also deeply flawed. Perhaps fitting giving its many contradictions.

Combat is sometimes exhilarating sometimes tedious. The eventual end point of Jesse combat, complete with telekinesis and floating, is enjoyable but it is also reminiscent of games like Mass Effect's biotic, the latter far better executed than it is in Control (especially by the time you can combat hover in ME:A). And while Control has some lofty goals in mind, it remains a game with the standard hierarchy of light, medium and heavy enemies, followed on repeat by the same enemies equipped with shields. It’s a fairly standard third-person Sci-Fi combat shooter setup like that found in ME, Deus Ex etc., and not unlike the majority of third-person person shooters from the last decade in general. The gun OoP is a neat idea but is just a narrative trick to cover what remains a standard hierarchy of weapon types and upgrades (pistol, shotgun, SMG, sniper, rocket launcher).

What control has going for it is its atmosphere and world building. The world inside the oldest house is eerie and magnetic, mysterious and forever drawing you in. The story itself is simple and not particularly original nor compelling. But the world built around it is the triumph of the game, the contradictory and endlessly shifting world of altered objects and events, and the FBC that studies them.

One of the biggest disappointments was the Ashtray maze. Perhaps because my expectation was built up via various reviews. I expected something complex and challenging, a true maze that required strategy and attention to detail to complete. Unfortunately it was a linear path that lead to more of Control’s standard waves of combat set to painfully cheesy metal. I was all in for a Doom 2016-esque rampage set to a great instrumental metal track, which is what I thought was what I was about to get. But the grating vocals drained all that potential from the scene. Any immersion the game was reaching for during the scene failed to land, especially when Jesse exclaimed “that was awesome” as she walked out the maze. I felt unintentionally distanciated, effectively un-sutured from the game at that moment in ways I doubt Remedy intended.

I enjoyed the world of Control, the characters, all the little notes and files that made up the minutia of the world, the impossible spaces of the oldest house, the Lyncian elements that populated some of the weirdest spaces of the game, particularly the Oceanview, and even most of the gameplay when the mechanics weren’t actively working against the player. It’s a good game that unfortunately fails to hit the heights it has set its eyes upon. It’s a bundle of great ideas that would benefit for some grander execution, additional variety in its action, and a stronger story that could pull from its brilliant world building.

I stepped out of my comfort zone to play Control after hearing all the praise for its atmosphere and storytelling. I will say it is (at least in its PC version) a technically amazing game, with really great UI and a general cinematic flair that even much larger games totally lack. There's an amazing interplay between the characters on screen and Jesse's direct address of the player that is genuinely unlike anything else out there and for that reason alone I think the game is worth playing.

At its heart Control is a Portal-like exercise in environmental storytelling, blending the supernatural with the bureaucratic in a way that's really intriguing. Of special note is the various live-action elements of the game, usually in the form of Dr. Darling's videotaped testimonies, which are genuinely impressive and well-done. Where the game really lost me is its combat, which is floaty and messy. The game's areas, which are already sort of haphazardly designed, are regularly flooded with enemies who scatter like rats and are as immune to bullets as Jesse is vulnerable to them. It just isn't fun hunting down scrub enemies who are running around 30 columns in long hallways, especially as part of a boss fight where the unpredictable AI can totally mess with your flow.

When I realized that I wasn't vibing with the combat, I did something I never, ever do: turned on invincibility and eventually the one-shot mode, just to make playing through the game more bearable. And even with these modes on I still felt like I was slogging through the combat chasing down 30 scrub enemies at a time. I can't imagine how boring it would be to play through the endgame without these settings enabled.

The thing is I really like the setting and the general vibe, if not the vanilla plot. I'm almost frustrated that I don't want to play the game more and see more of the side quests. I played the Ultimate Edition and feel like I wasted money because I'm not interested in playing more, even if I'm nominally interested in the space where the game takes place. I never loved shooters to begin with, but I could get along with games like Uncharted. My experience with Control makes me never want to play a third person shooter again, even one that lets you fly around.

Played digital Ultimate Edition on PC. Ran like a dream. Completed main story and got all the core skills.

(This review copied over from Steam, initially written June 28, 2021)

This is the kind of game I could just tell from a glance would be right up my alley. I like to go into games with little-to-no prior knowledge, but I didn’t need to know much beyond the fact it’s a third-person shooter full of cool powers, weird paranormal shit, and a badass heroine plowing through it all. Admittedly, it didn’t deliver completely on all accounts, but I ultimately was quite pleased with the experience, with some caveats.

The story itself is fairly bizarre. If you know anything about this game, that’s probably not surprising. You follow Jesse Faden, who has taken a job as at a janitor at a top-secret government agency only to have the (mis)fortune of being chosen instead to act as the Director of said agency she barely understands. The game then follows her as she obtains and develops various powers and abilities to help in fighting her way through the twists and turns of the Oldest House, the Federal Bureau of Control’s paranormally batshit base of operations. The physics, layout, and rules of the building are constantly in flux, forcing the Bureau to adapt and do its best to try and keep a handle on the changing environment. I won’t give too much away, but the core of the game is accomplishing a number of story missions requiring you to navigate different parts of the Oldest House to achieve different goals, ultimately leading toward more personal story content that intersects with Jesse’s past. Each segment runs into hiccups caused by the morphing building and its numerous objects of power. Along the way, Jesse seeks to obtain several of the powers these objects yield. Not surprisingly, you also uncover some of the secrets behind Jesse’s past and her motivations in coming to the Bureau in the first place.

Probably my biggest issue is that the game has a certain air of implication to it, as if there’s some deeper layer behind everything that’s going on that I just wasn’t getting, when there’s really not that much to it. There’s a kind of pretentious air to the story-telling, especially with Jesse’s thoughts about why she’s at the Bureau, that would fit a much wilder story full of twists and turns that simply aren’t there. While this seemed kind of cool at first, it just didn’t feel very fitting when it mostly doesn’t end up paying off very well considering the story isn’t nearly so complex as it's made out to be. The game has strange otherworldly elements enough that it really didn’t need this added layer of “player, this is a strange story” to get that across. Weirdly, I started to enjoy the story a lot more when I realized that, simply put: it ain’t that deep. The characters were also mostly a miss for me. None of them really stand out as all that engaging or intriguing personalities. They can usually be reduced to a couple basic traits and at most have a few amusing lines here and there. Even Jesse is surprisingly kind of bland, though she is a little more interesting just given all of the focus she gets as the main character who we get a bit more insight into given the access to her thoughts and past.

All that said, I still consider this an overall pretty good game. These days I tend to care a lot about story, narrative, and atmosphere, so the fact that I can still say this despite the above issues is rather significant. The first caveat that’s more in the story vein is that I thoroughly enjoyed the various challenges and puzzles you complete to obtain the different items of power (they’re called Altered Objects and Objects of Power, which the game goes to great lengths to differentiate, but I’ll just keep it simple and group them together). These were a ton of fun because each object, which is generally a very basic object like a refrigerator or a clock, is sort of “possessed” in some way that makes it behave erratically or interact with the world in a special way, such as teleporting around or warping the environment in some way. If you successfully deal with these manifestations, you can obtain the power of that object, giving you some kind of boost or entirely new ability. I found these puzzles to be generally entertaining and clever and they never really feel repetitive. It was really fun learning the theme of an item and then using that knowledge to solve the puzzle and consequently gain a thematic new ability from it. The notes describing the history of the item and how it was discovered were always entertaining as well.

Lastly on story, while I had my qualms, I think the general story itself is okay aside from the narrative choices above that bothered me. Once I kind of got a feel for the tone and narrative style, I was able to enjoy the story less ambivalently. The actual missions themselves also tend to be pretty neat and do help to add further to the characters since many of the missions are given to you by one of the characters with some particular goal in mind that has to do with them or their specialty.

Combat is the core gameplay of Control and I think it’s one of the strongpoints of the game. Even the simple shooting mechanics feel responsive and satisfying. Beyond that, you get several powers that expand your arsenal of options, making you more powerful and more versatile. Every one you get warps your options a lot and changes the landscape and choreography of your fights significantly. The powers are pretty fun and give you a variety of paranormal abilities. I think the game could’ve used one more major power for perfection, but this lack isn’t especially noticeable and simply would’ve been nice. The combat is also balanced pretty well. With this kind of game, I typically play on harder difficulties. This game interestingly doesn’t have difficulty settings. While there are a lot of opinions on difficulty settings, this interesting choice worked out really well for me. Despite being decent at third person shooters, I still found a good deal of challenge and didn’t CRAVE a higher setting, but also never felt like encounters were unfair or couldn’t be solved by a better approach. If you’re just terrible at this kind of game though, I could see this being frustrating if you just want to play through the story on an easier setting. Though I didn’t mess with it, I believe there was a patched-in “assist mode” to alleviate some of these concerns so this may not be an issue now.

Rarely will graphics alone be good enough to be an incentive to play. If there were such a game though, this might be it. The graphics in Control look amazing. I ran this with a mid-to-high end PC, but it ran fine for me. I’m not sure how it looks on lower settings, but I was thoroughly pleased with it and it was the perfect way to test out the PC I put together about a month beforehand. The gorgeous detailed character models add real life to the people you interact with and the smooth look of, well, everything, provides its own atmosphere to the Oldest House and makes the flashy complex combat look even more awesome.

I highly recommend the Ultimate Edition with the DLCs. Both of them are great, but I especially liked AWE. The DLCs did exactly what I wanted, including more of the item puzzles I so enjoyed from the base game, improving a lot on the narrative issues I had with much stronger story execution, and adding new elements to both exploration and combat to make things more interesting. It’s a great value and adds a significant chunk of enjoyable content.

Overall this game isn’t without its flaws, but in my opinion, the good far, far outweighs the bad. Further, for a game of its kind, 35+ hours is a pretty solid length, especially considering it never really got old for me. Even though I binged most of this game, I felt a little sad to be done with it. I’d say if you don’t go in with too high of expectations for story or character, you’ll probably find something to really enjoy in Control. At the very least, despite some of its familiar mechanics, it manages to be a pretty unique game that’s worth trying.

For a while, it looked like this would become my GOTY at the time of playing.

Control is awesome. It’s one of those games that you just want to play because of how good it feels to play it, which to me, was a Remedy first. I’ve always loved their games due to the aesthetics and narratives they encapsulate. The problem with them was always the mechanical side. From Max Payne to Quantum Break, none of their games have ever played great. Control is absolutely no different when it comes to story and art direction: the game looks incredible, with a very stylised presentation and masterful use of light, colour and cinematic tone. But what it does do differently is showing us Remedy at their gameplay peak.

I am actually somewhat shocked to see how much the studio has evolved on the gameplay front in a three-year span, since Quantum Break. The best example of this, apart from the character movement, can be found in the Arkane-like abilities Control allows you to use. You can shield, levitate, dash, and most notably, you can use virtually anything as a weapon (including enemies) by launching them. The latter in particular feels phenomenal to engage with. With the help of the surprising destructible environments, combat and interactivity become an absolute blast, and Launch becomes your main means of aggression - even if the game also offers you several effective, unique-looking guns to use. Tied to this is a rewarding sense of progression and power fantasy that Control infuses in the game as you through it and improve your abilities. This, more than anything, is the part of the game that I really loved.

Control is much more than that though. In true Remedy fashion, the story is rather mysterious, never straightforward and constantly engaging, even if the ending is a bit underwhelming. There are some truly interesting moments, impactful revelations, and if I had any criticism to levy against it, I’d say that the urgency imprinted on the narrative makes it illogical for the player to deviate from it in order to tackle some of the side content (though you can safely ignore stuff like the somewhat pointless Bureau Alert missions). Control’s story is highly interesting in the way that Max Payne, Alan Wake and Quantum Break’s stories are highly interesting. And part of it is handled through captivating worldbuilding and exposition, not just through documents, but through videos and curated shows (The Threshold Kids episodes are amongst the weirdest, creepiest things I’ve seen in games in recent years).

In fact, after playing it, I don’t understand the criticism I had heard saying there’s ‘too much to read’ in the game. I didn’t feel that - at all - at any point during the main campaign. The only exception to this was the AWE DLC, which in my opinion contained way too many collectibles, was way too driven by a fan-service appeal and, as a whole, was a low point in the whole Control experience. In fact, the introduction of this DLC towards the end-game phase threw off the pacing in a way that was so frustrating that made me ignore it and go back to focus on the main story. A story which, ironically, didn’t even need that expansion to offer the fans really interesting, logical and satisfying connections to the Alan Wake universe. Personally, I think the AWE expansion would’ve worked much better if unlocked only after the main game, since you can continue to play it anyway.

Another thing I loved about Control was its level design, which again, showed us Remedy in a way we hadn’t quite seen before. The Bureau building is incredible, vast, unique, and in a lot of ways a character in itself. Granted, navigation is a bit confusing until you get the hang of it, and if I’m being honest, I wasn’t really fond of the fact that some of the areas are initially locked - metroidvania-style - for no real reason. But the fast travel system works quite well and makes backtracking feel seamless, so no real issues there. Getting to know the building, with all its nooks and secrets, was an absolute joy and delivered no short amount of surprises and really high moments.

So my overall impression after playing Control is a really, really positive one. I ended up not loving it as much as Alan Wake just because I personally felt the story wasn’t as good and didn’t quite stick the landing. But there’s no denying that there are a lot of things in this game that highlight Remedy’s technical evolution and cement them as one of the most interesting, identifiable studios in the industry. Highly recommended. 8.5/10