Control Ultimate Edition

This game had a lot of negative press, for good reason in my opinion, upon release. I'm already reluctant to buy games outside of GOG because I love my DRM-free access and this one gave me more reasons to avoid it. But I had heard enough people rave about how unique an experience it was, how good the graphics were, that when it came to GOG it piqued my interest enough to talk to a friend about it. They gifted it to me and I tell you what, it would've been worth it if I had spent my own money on it. In depth story line with tons of side content in this Ultimate edition release. Some main line DLCs can take hours to do on their own. I did every main side quest and the vast majority of the small stuff. I struggle with some boss battles so my time will likely be more inflated than yours if you make your playthrough as exhaustive as mine, but I can tell you that if you do, you will be well over the 15 hour average. The gameplay is fun and you generally will have more than one way to skin a cat. Skill tree is pretty straight forward and the weapon and personal mods do a solid job enabling the way that you prefer to play, but I don't recall being able to switch out mod groupings. The gameplay was enjoyable and rewards being a more skilled combatant the majority of the time. But being overleveled can compensate for a lot. HERE IS MY BIGGEST POINT: The game world is immersive, every answer you get leads to more questions, especially with so many of the files being redacted. Learning about Jesse's history, the history of the Bureau, the nature of AWEs, OOPs, and altered items was so intriguing to me. The lore is what makes this game, no question. It felt lovingly crafted. The story is one that feels routine when you focus on the main quest, but it does integrate many established archetypes well, it certainly wasn't haphazard. But I must emphasize again, allowing yourself to get sucked in by the lore of this game world will make it one that you don't want to leave.

I'd say it's like Half Life 2 in TPP mode, but instead of gravity gun you can use telekinesis. It was super fun for me when combining telekinesis with levitate mode. And this plot... I really liked it, especially with humorous inserts. 10/10 for me + Great story. Getting to know what was happening b4 was fun for me and moreover video recording seems like it was recorded in real life. A lot of work was made to do so + Atmosphere - somehow dark, mysterious and fascinating (all those research about the oldest house and all those events like shifting and other stuff) +- Combat style - at the beggining everything was new and fun, but at the end of the story fights gets repetitive, though it is still fun. I've bought it on Epic Games Store, but I would have bought it on GoG If I had known it's here. It seems Metro Exodus is here too, finally.

Fun, dark, heavy and most of all, very enjoyable. The game caught my attention the moment I laid my eyes on it. Never bothered to get it since I didn't had the funds. Even so, the graphics and the gameplay presented by the trailers really sold the game. I had no idea what it was about, but it look fun to play. This game is heavy, I mean, I'm no fan of horror movies/games, so, to me, the overall environment and ambient of the game feels heavy and dark, right from the start. "What happened? Everything is so dark, where's everyone?" I thought to myself. In the other hand "The art style and graphics is astaunding, just wow". The more I play, the more I want to play. The feelings the game invoques, and the lore it presents, it makes me think, it makes me dream and it makes me question "What if this happened, what if this is happening in our world and we have no idea about it?". I love it. It makes my brain work and it makes me feel things. This, is A game! Spectacular art and graphic, paired with amazing partially destructible environments, makes the game vibrant and alive even though it feels dead and empty at times. Let's call it beatiful darkness. Sounds design is very good. The guns sound real and surreal at times. The enemies have that monster like voices and there's always an erie chanting all over the place that really drives that feeling of dread. It's amazing. Gameplay wise, the main character moves realistically in all the ways, it's not perfect obviously, but it's pretty good. Smooth animation transitions. One thing that really bothers me, the way they made the mouths of characters when takling, the lipsinching, the mouths never fully close. Imagine yourself takling without fully closing your mouth. All in all, very good game. You can do the main missions and follow the story or you can do side missions along the way as well. You're not totally bound to one way of playing the game. Not gonna provide more details as I think the fun is in the discovery.

Control is a good game, blending a superb light horror story with interesting if repetitive gameplay. As a shooter alone, the game lacks; its health mechanism is clunky, and the level design & graphical style obscures too much for competent gunplay, but I don't think one plays Control for the shooting alone. The protagonist, played perfectly by Courtney Hope, finds herself drawn into the Bureau and the catastrophe that has unfolded inside it; what I love most about the story, from all of its subtle horror & quirky 1960's aesthetic to the various lore strewn about, is that her circumstances slowly evolve from 'I'm unexpectedly locked in here with you' to 'you're locked in here with me', and it makes for a truly fun time, worth every little exploration & interesting corner. It's by no means perfect. I deducted one star for a couple of reasons; the first is technical. Even at Ultimate Update 2, the occasional crash mid-boss-fight and needing to use mods to fix texture loading isn't the best experience. When I had to keep entering a menu to just read a combination on a whiteboard, it got more than a little annoying. The other is down to a few frustrating design decisions (many of which can be modded around). The health pickup system and lack of any real shield/cover/dodge in early game makes for a lot of annoying deaths, not least when Jesse gets stuck on many of the destructible parts of the world. The boss fights are mostly poor; built around specific concepts that require you to tailor your approach to what the dev had in mind; one of the expansion bosses can really only be beaten one way and only with the right mods. To Remedy's credit, there is an Assist set of options that can even make you immortal to just enjoy the game and get through these, but it's testament to the game being better at telling a story than at providing quality, varied & heavily tested gameplay. All that said, I'd buy a sequel in a heartbeat. It's a protagonist & world I'd love to revisit.

To be honest - I did expect a fairly bland cover-shooter. I got an kind of bland shooter with mechanics that just worked and a solid story. This game is better than it looks from the outside. Got a kind of Painkiller feeling in the sense that it was not the most creative kind of game, but i just could not stop playing. You have to be interested in atmosphere, a lot of (optional) text and accept that most of the levels look similar.