Control Ultimate Edition

When I first played Control, I expected a fancy tech demo with serviceable third person shooting mechanics. And boy was I wrong. Control has a ton to offer and took me over 40 hours to finish. I have a few problems, but first let me tell you how pleasantly surprised I was. - Fun Gameplay Loop: So you fight a big roster of different enemies, they drop weapon/personal mod items and currency. You use that currency to improve weapons. Completing objectives gives you ability points to improve your character. Firefights will get really chaotic and a clean office space can turn into a pile of rubble with your supernatural powers and environmental damage during combat. - Interesting Story: So you go inside this paranatural government facility and things get crazy. You save the world from this internal threat from spilling outside the building. Video logs you find are filmed with live actors too! - Patch: I recommend using the "Unofficial Comprehensive Patch" (available on pcgamingwiki). It disables achievements, but improves the visuals and lets you skip the intro videos. - Great Visuals: Control looks amazing and will bring the most high end hardware to its knees. Thankfully it's optimized well and is pretty easy on your CPU. So mid and even low end GPUs can run this game fine, but just stick to 1080p and maybe disable some of the more demanding graphics settings. - Stable: Control only crashed a couple times in 40+ hours, and it was always when selecting a menu in a fast travel point. Few things I didn't like: - Only ONE difficulty setting, which kinda stinks. - Two weapons at a time: there's actually many different cool weapons, but you have to go through a menu to select which two you want to be able to quickly switch between. - Weak character progression: The upgrades are like "+30% health" or "+75% launch damage". Nothing too innovative or interesting. All in all, Control was too much fun. So it gets a super duper recommendation from me!

Personally, I love the storyline in this. It's a little different. Quirky.. A new take on the paranormal without having to be "oooh, ghosty". There's not a lot of multiple ways round things; the story is fairly linear, but that's a bonus in this case, rather than a flaw. There's definitely a tale to be told, and it's spun rather well (it's in the same order as a gripping book that you just keep thinking "one more page before I go to sleep, just one more page..", then find the sun is coming up.. The worst part is, there doesn't seem to be much of a 'cover' mechanic, so you either completely obscure yourself from line of fire, or seem to get full blast. And some of the fights do swarm you, making survival tough. There's the expectation that you'll need to reload a few times to work out a viable strategy, and you'll need to be observant to do it (most bosses telegraph actions, and there are usually responses that can be applied if you think hard). That being said, it's still a "younger person's" experience, and those of us who're getting on a bit may have difficulty making the tight requirements for a long battle. So to help us out, the devs have added a set of "assists", which do exactly what the heading says; assist you on the way. They won't hold your hand (apart from 'invulnerability' and 'one shot kill'), but selectively let you reduce damage taken (so you can maybe afford to miss out on dodging a few hits), and regen your energy faster (so you can use your parautilitarian skills a few times more in a fight, and maybe just tip the scales in your favour enough). It's definitely in my "Gems to remember" category, and will no doubt be played again, the same way an old favourite movie is, in years to come.

It's SCP game with great graphics and combat. Did you know you can rip the ground to create a shield to defend and then throw back at enemies. You can destroy almost anything. It has great Remedy style story. Great DLCs to scratch that extra itch. And overall that great feeling of exploration of an empty Office. 10/10 from me, it's on par with Alan Wake and Max Payne.

I quite enjoyed the oddball setting of the ever-shifting Bureau. It also tends become more fun as one accumulates powers, although I must say it's way too easy to get into a certain combat pattern later on, and fights tend to feel a tad repetitive towards the end. Still, the spectacle of shit flying everywhere during the carnage was always fun to watch. The boss fights were pretty good, too. While the game ran just fine for me for the most part, the most notable part (which seems to be common) is a crash that happens with the Anchor boss which I could only get past by dialing down a lot of the graphical settings, after searching for possible causes online. That's really the only issue I recall having.

Overall great game with creepy atmosphere. Pros: - great gunplay - very reminescent of SCP with how even mundane things seem creepy - release on GOG was the thing that pushed me to purchase it - visually stunning - side missions were as interesting as main ones Cons: - I couldn't care less for random loot, game would be better without it, having insted branching upgrades would do the same thing better in my opinon - extra content being exclusive to console