by Danreb VictorioCONTROL: Resonant was the very last game I got my hands on at Summer Game Fest. It was also the very last game I scheduled an appointment for. Little did I know that I was saving the best for last at SGF Play Days.
How did we get from Control to CONTROL Resonant? It’s complicated.
The original Control was a game that I thought was okay when I reviewed it in 2019. Since then, Remedy has both come into its own as a studio and created a heck of a universe with Control, Alan Wake 2, and now this sequel over seven years later.
I’m not gonna lie. One of the reasons I only gave the original game a 3.5 (though it was my fifth favorite game that year) was that the story was just overly dense for me. Unfortunately for guys like me, CONTROL Resonant looks to be just as dense, and the fact that we are where we are is quite the wonder and a testament to what Remedy has in store.
In the first game, you used Jesse Faden to track down her brother Dylan by infiltrating The Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), which Jesse is also now head of. She succeeds but finds out that the time Dylan spent in containment ruined him, and when she saves his life, he ends up in a deep coma.
In the sequel, Dylan wakes from his coma and becomes the protagonist who now must find the missing Jesse. My, how the tables have turned.
Speaking of tables turning, the original game was a third-person action-adventure with plenty of gunplay. CONTROL: Resonant trades in the sidearm and is now a hack-and-slash action-RPG with quite a bit of platforming.
I can absolutely end the preview here, but I played for over an hour and a half, so I figure I’ll just talk about the full experience.
The Demo
When Dylan comes to, he finds an object called the Aberrant (which we later use as a weapon) lodged in his chest. Since you’re the main character and can’t really die, as soon as he pulls it out, you’re left with your first big decision: what shape the Aberrant takes, and in turn, the style of attacks you’ll possess. There’s the Slash, which essentially turns the Aberrant into a scythe; Flurry, twin daggers with light yet quick attacks; and Slice, essentially a powerful axe. I went with the Slash Aberrant because that looked the most badass.
The Oldest House was the least of our worries.
From here, our task was to escape the Oldest House, and thanks to the Aberrant, it was simple. Some of the agents were unfortunately taken over by the Hiss (the enemies in this Control‘s world), and they end up being fodder for your weapon as you learn how to fight with it. Eventually, you escape, but again–bad luck. Manhattan is absolutely overrun with Hiss and all sorts of enemies terrorizing the city. Eventually, you’ll run into an FBC agent by the name of Zoe, and as she talks to you, you’re only allowed to give passively reserved answers because Dylan is in a predicament where he doesn’t know if people really should know who he is. So while trying to find out what’s going on and locate Jesse, you’re also worried about this cat-and-mouse game with others who might learn your identity.
From here, you have to go from sector to sector, ridding each area of Hiss, making the experience feel like Kingdom Hearts, since barriers block many paths forward. It also doubles as an opportunity to teach you more about the combat as battles start to ramp up in difficulty, with more enemies, big and small, starting to vary their aggressiveness toward Dylan. From there, you’re given another choice of three for your secondary weapon, which include Crush (another slow hammer), Extend (a whip that I absolutely chose), and a Drill, which packs quite a heavy punch in its own right. In addition to a little video in the UI showing what the moves can do, you can also try them out in real time to see what actually suits you.
It’s also a platformer.
As mentioned earlier, CONTROL Resonant has its fair share of platforming, and it’s quality platforming. Eventually, I reached this point where I had to make my way up some rooftops, and as I did that and headed for some glowing goals (yay, level design), I unlocked all sorts of platforming abilities. A dash for an extra burst of forward movement while you’re in the air, a double jump (because video games), and the ability to slowly levitate upward–which is probably the closest thing you have to something that Jesse did in the original game. The area you learn these abilities pretty much teaches you how to use them properly as you begin to explore some more, and eventually you end up in an open area of the city… Boss time.
It wouldn’t be an action game without a fun fight against a severed head, and Dylan immediately has that to worry about. This is where I first died in the game, and I was happy to see that I respawned right at the place where the boss is, and you can skip the cutscene, so you can go right back to it. It was an epic fight that saw the head use everything within its vicinity to kill you. Cars, traffic lights, road debris — you name it, the boss uses it. It’s a pretty easy fight otherwise: just avoid its attacks, go in close, and hack away. And eventually it’ll reach a point of aggro where parts of the ground float up, likely to charge its super, but you can use the raised ground as platforms to keep attacking and get rid of it for good.
We need more, but The Evacuation Zone is nice too.
The campaign part of the demo ended after the boss, and from there, Remedy also let me try out the Evacuation Zone. I don’t know if this is a mode or a whole other aspect of the campaign, but the idea is kind of like what we were doing at the beginning by ridding a part of the city of the enemies in it. Except this time, the enemies are way more plentiful and aggressive, and it does an excellent job making you think of using your whole suite of attacks and abilities to survive. In all honesty, the Evacuation Zone felt like Remedy’s version of a musou, and while I’m not too fond of those, for what I was doing and how much more of the game I wanted, this really satiated the need to play some more Control.
For those that don’t know me, that is my absolute wheelhouse, and as tired as I was toward the end of SGF Play Days, CONTROL Resonant‘s gameplay simply blew me away. It feels polished and ready. I’ve been thinking about this game a lot, and I want it now.
Remedy has everything going for them right now with CONTROL Resonant, except for one thing: The game comes out during what’s probably the busiest two weeks of the year. Likely in an effort to stay away from Grand Theft Auto VI, CONTROL Resonant finds itself in the middle of a AAA buzzsaw of releases that includes Marvel’s Wolverine, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Our staff is both nervous and salivating over what will be available to review come September 24, but you can bet we’ll have coverage of this game when it launches on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
CONTROL Resonant
