Control Resonant Review
Taking Control has never felt this good.
Control Resonant is the sequel to Remedy's 2019 hit Control, and it picks things up some years after the events of the first game. This time around you are in control of Dylan, Jesse's brother, and while he is a very different character in both backstory and personality, I warmed up to him quickly enough that I never really found myself missing the first game's protagonist. I won't go into much detail about the story to avoid spoilers, but the short version is this: a paranormal disaster has broken free from the Oldest House, the ever shifting building where the original game took place, and it has spilled out into the real world. More specifically, into Manhattan.
And that is where the biggest change comes from. I find myself saying this way too often these days, but Control Resonant is now an open world game. Before anyone groans, that is not a bad thing here. I genuinely enjoy a well designed open world, and I'm glad to say Remedy did a fantastic job with it in almost every aspect.
This twisted version of Manhattan really does feel like a concrete jungle overrun by everything that escaped the Oldest House. It might not quite match the strange, constantly rearranging interior of the first game, or at least it doesn't seem like it at the start, but Remedy has done an excellent job of translating that unmistakable Control vibe into an open setting. The streets are filled with paranatural enemies, strange objects ranging from genuinely cursed to downright silly, and entire districts so twisted by gravity shifts (quite literally) that your brain starts to hurt just looking at them.
If there is one small knock against the open world, it is that the city setting can occasionally feel a little dull or repetitive to look at. There are a handful of regions that go completely off the rails, with multi directional, upside down, gravity bending architecture that looks and plays like nothing else, but at the end of the day a lot of it is still concrete buildings. I want to be clear that I mean this purely visually and not in a gameplay sense, and it is a minor complaint at most. On the flip side, it gave me a real early 2010s feeling, reminiscent of games like Infamous, and that is always welcome.
Where the open world truly shines is in how it feels to move through it. Traversal is great. It is smooth and responsive, you have multiple dashes at your disposal, and there is a glide that at times feels almost like flying, so simply getting from one place to another is a joy. Later on you unlock an ability that lets you shift gravity and flip certain regions entirely, to the point where it becomes wonderfully disorienting. It could be a little finicky at times, but when it works it is one of the coolest things in the game.
And speaking of disorienting, this is not a game that holds your hand. You will get lost, and you will get lost a lot, even while following main story objectives. Control Resonant is neither extremely long nor particularly short, but it will certainly feel longer than it actually is simply because of how confusing and tricky to traverse some areas are. Your navigation skills will be put to the test. I'm not the biggest fan of constant navigational roadblocks, but the same design philosophy also brings something I really appreciated: genuinely interesting puzzles right there on the main path. That is rare to see in games today, and I love a good puzzle that trusts the player to figure it out without a flashing marker telling them what to do.
Now for my biggest gripe, which is the combat. Unlike Jesse, Dylan fights with paranatural melee weapons and powers, backed by full skill trees, upgrades, loadouts and proper build crafting. The combat itself is smooth and feels good in the hands. There is a nice dodge, multiple weapon classes and plenty of room to experiment. The problem is the regular, non boss enemies you run into around Manhattan, which can become boring and repetitive very fast. Depending on the build you go for, it mostly plays like a hack and slash, and I think there are simply too many enemies in each open world encounter, with several of them being rather tanky on top of that. There is a decent variety of enemy types visually, but most of them end up feeling the same to fight. Honestly, at a certain point I turned on the one hit kill option in the Assist menu to trivialise the combat and focus on the part of the game I was enjoying most, the exploration.
Before moving on though, I want to be fair. My complaints are only about the random mob encounters. The bosses are a completely different story. They are very good, interesting and fun, and some of them are properly challenging too. It is just a shame that most of them are optional and that you don't actually face all that many during the main story.
Which brings me to the exploration, and this is where Control Resonant is at its absolute best. The open world is not huge, but it is dense, and Remedy has taken the already great exploration of the first Control and turned it up to eleven. This is where the Control identity really comes through, in all the little optional things you stumble across, and there are a lot of them. There are large optional bosses known as Resonants, side quests, collectibles and a whole range of activities built around paranatural objects. One has you dealing with cameras that freeze time while you search for an alternative route to flank them. Another, in classic Control fashion, is a cursed karaoke machine that won't let anyone stop dancing until you sing the song with the correct lyrics. Then there are the puzzles with that signature Remedy touch, like walking into a launderette and switching on the right washing machines to open a secret passage full of collectibles. I love all of it so much.
My only wish here is that there were even more of it. It is not as if there are only one or two of these moments, far from it, but I absolutely adore that Remedy flavour of puzzles that feel like little escape rooms and cursed objects that feel like miniature SCP entries, and I would have happily taken twice as many. When a game's biggest problem is that you want more of its best content, it is doing something right.
The soundtrack also deserves a special shoutout. Just like in the first game, there are some standout sections accompanied by fantastic tracks that make those moments stick with you long after they are over.
Visually, the game is solid but nothing groundbreaking by today's standards. The environments look great, while character models could definitely have used a little more polish. I played on a PS5 Pro in Performance mode and had a very stable experience overall, with maybe one or two frame rate dips in very specific spots and no crashes to speak of.
All in all, this is great work from Remedy. Control Resonant takes the Control we all know and love and successfully turns it into something bigger. The combat against regular enemies wears thin and you will absolutely get lost more than once, but the traversal, the bosses, the puzzles and above all the wonderfully weird exploration make it an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoyed the first game, and a great reason to jump in for anyone who didn't.
