Control Ultimate Edition

As a big fan of Remedy and their Max Payne and Alan Wake games I must say that I am very pleased by this game. A lot of storytelling is through the collected notes, however there are also some dialogues with quite interesting characters throughout the game so I must say that the Old House feels to be quite alive and gifted with interesting and funny dialogues. I love how mysterious the story is and how well connected it seems to be with the Alan Wake universe. First I have thought that this is going to be one of the low budget games with which you might feel that they lack some content or you might feel that it doesn't really have so called "AAA" production values. Howver the opossite is true here. I am playing now for more than 40 hours, there is a TON of content in this, the environment is dense, filled with stuff to collect and to do, there are quite some sidequests which you might complete accept or not, and it looks like there are many hidden secrets as well. It feels to me that I am still far away from completing the game. The environment of the levels is very well designed and the levels are quite distinct from each other and easy to remember (not forgetable). The actions and combat is something which leaves me speechless like "WOW!", I do not know if I have actually seen such a cool action in any game yet. Of course bullet-time in Max Payne 2 for example looked pretty cool, but this is several levels above that and it's not just about looking cool, it's about having access to awesome abilities which make you feel almost like a small god and really mastering the abilities, weapons and character / weapon upgrades which are at your disposal. The combat is really fluid, cool and challenging. Sometimes the difficulty might be a bit frustrating, but that only empowers the satisfaction from dealing with the enemies / bosses. The world of CONTROL is amazing and I hope more gamers will be able to discover it, I am sure you will not be dissapointed.

+ Great story, well-told + Great vocal cast + Great atmosphere - Useless crafting - Tons of back-tracking - One level of difficulty. Accept it, or quit – or activate cheats, which were added after release as a quick way to shut people up who were complaining about difficulty. - Cheap boss design. The second Tommasi boss fight is straight-up bs. - The Anchor boss is still broken. - Dark Souls’ style checkpoints. - Confusing level design. You can frequently see where you want to go on the map, but no idea how to actually get there. - Side-quests can require specific skills to complete – skills that are acquired later in the story. The game does nothing to tell you this. Try over and over to complete a specific mission, only to look it up online and discover you have to abandon it for now b/c you don’t have the right skill / talent. - Visually boring. It’s nearly all grey concrete office space. - Slow texture stream-in. Can take 30 seconds or more for textures to fully load (game was installed to an SSD). - I don’t have a ray-tracing gpu (RX 5700XT). The graphics are terrible. Reflections are badly glitched; reflective surfaces are covered in a grainy shimmer (disabling Global Reflections while maxing Screenspace Reflections helped, but didn’t solve the problem). The light balance is off; brightness is over-driven in well-lit areas, but it’s hard to see in dark areas. Even hair (for example, Emily Pope’s) is oddly grainy. (Yes, I turned film grain off.) Anti-aliasing still leaves jagged edges everywhere. Facial animations are very good, though. Been a fan of Remedy’s since the original Max Payne game. Control is another great addition to the unique collection of stories that their games tell. And it does tie in with other Remedy games (Quantum Break and Alan Wake). But even with all the talent, and the attention to detail, Remedy continue to produce brilliantly flawed games. Control is, unfortunately, not an exception.

I bought CONTROL on the Epic Store earlier this year, but after it released on GOG, I just had to buy it again because it is one of my favorite games in recent years. The star of the show is The Oldest House, HQ of the Federal Bureau of Control and place of power is a simply fantastic place. Visually beautiful, surreal, sometimes non-euclidean and always providing interesting architecture as stages for the game's enemy encounters. So you are offered a wide palette of opportunities to move, cover and attack. Combat, focused mainly on mid-range, is polished in every detail, movement always feels incredibly smooth and attacks-both with your service gun and your powers-seamlessly integrate. The game plays like a charm and even challenging encounters are fun and largely fair. Exceptions are some of the bosses which can represent quite the spike in difficulty. But every enemy always follows some sort of pattern and understanding that is the key to victory. And if that fails, the open nature of the game always makes it possible to come back later after you developed Jesse further. These developments don't just focus on making your attacks stronger or increasing your stats, but also add different fire modes to your gun, add new effects to your powers and so on. In the first hour of the game, the storytelling felt a bit messy to me. The Oldest House is full of cryptic notes, documents and Jesse herself doesn't feel like providing the player with exposition either. That can be quite confusing. But as the game goes on, the narrative becomes way more clear. In hindsight, I like this approach quite a bit because not only made it the world more believable, but it also added to the impact the Oldest House and this world had on me. And this is truly one of the game's strong points. If you like the surreal, the supernatural and Sam Lake's work in general, CONTROL can be a truly < immersive / gripping / fantastic > ride.

Game crashes at the beginning of Anchor fight. The problem is known for a long time and ignored by developers.

Loved it from top to bottom. Really satisfying combat, rewarding exploration and beautiful level design. You're mostly doing the same gameplay-wise for most of the game but it works because the presentation is impeccable, the world remains intriguing even after finishing the game, and basically because it's FUN. Also played both expansions (and 'Alan Wake' before to get the full context). 'AWE' was very mid - more of the same but nothing special. 'The Foundation', though, is great. 'Control' at its best. Compelling mysteries, an awesome action set piece, cool new location, and two new traversal/combat abilities. Way better than AWE, and a proper epilogue to the game. As a caveat, I'll say that I've played both DLCs more than half a year after finishing the main game, and I lost some of the combat flow and mechanic muscle it required, so I switched on 'immortality' and never looked back. You still take damage, and if you're like me, you'll still feel like you're about to die, but you don't, so you never loose progress. Completely enjoyed both pieces of DLC thanks to this, so I recommend doing so if you are in a similar position.