Control Ultimate Edition

If you like SCP, X-Files or similar vibes, this game is a must play. Incredible story, great visuals, good gameplay.

What a game. Hadn't played it for 2 years, got back into it and it still amazes me at every turn. The setting, the weirdness, the story: all wonderful. And the actual gameplay as well!

navigation is a mess. the map gets boring after a while. the same building assets are re-used and its confusing to find where to go or what to do

1st the good: The visuals are great - clean, striking, just waiting to be trashed by explosions, bullets, & telekinetic powers; piles of clutter blast across the room with every impact, chaos in the orderly halls of the FBC. Details humanize the FBC & add life to an otherwise stark place. When Control works, it WORKS, & luckily Go-go-gadget-blunt-force-trauma is as effective as it is satisfying. <3 Dr. Darling. Ran on Linux Proton 9.0-3, DX11. Unfortunately it doesn't always work, & by the time I beat the game & DLC I felt more frustrated than satisfied. My core issue is the difficulty scaling/balance: It sucks, as soon as Control runs out of new enemies to intro. Tougher ones (& most bosses) are identical, just with more HP & damage. HP bars and levels are distracting & unimmersive but without them it's impossible to tell what identical enemies are more of a threat. Astral Spikes are only scary until you realize how easy they are to ignore. Launch >> everything else, as raw damage is king & they don't scale enough with enemy HP. The gun is trash except Pierce/Charge. Some mods help, but too late to matter; most are garbage, especially the stupidly specific DLC mods, & they make for awful, needless inventory management. Missions aren't worth the travel time; Countermeasures too, unless you abuse the free reroll to get good rewards for the area you're already in. Puzzles suck; the solution is often right next to it, or characters just say it out loud. Overall I found the story contrived & "tell don't show". Jesse's too happy risking her life for cardboard cutout characters who kidnapped her brother, like the "badass" Marshall who doesn't do 1 cool thing the entire game, or Arish who claims to be busy while rooted in place parroting the same lines again and again. The map (terrible, doesn't even reflect reality) is the only thing usable on the move, leaving me stuck in a menu for 2' of audio or Trench/Marshall/Wake/Board talking vaguely over a repetitive slideshow.

It's a fantastic, thematic game that pulls you in, lets you the player learn more about the world as you play along and explore an Eldritch 1950s base that gets progressively weirder the deeper you go. The only problem in my opinion is the game grinding mechanic outpaces the story telling. I started to feel that if I wanted to play the game completely, I wound up wandering into combats that had no story and so broke tension of the story. EG, the first time you meet an artifact that kills a Bureau agent, it's thematic. The eighth time, it starts to feel a little formulaic. Great game overall and focuses on the mood over the plot.