Control Ultimate Edition

A solid third-person shooter with an interesting story and setting which is ultimately let down by a host of instability issues. I was eventually forced to give up after 15 hours due to a crash corrupting my save and the only option being to restart a chapter and lose hours of progress. The fact that previous saves are inaccessible is such an incredible no-no.

Like other Remedy games, Control is a third person story driven game. For a story driven game however, a huge percentage of play time is spent using its generic third person shooter mechanics: just six different weapons in a 30 hour game with recharging ammo, a very basic weapon upgrade system, the laziest ability tree I've ever seen with the vast majority of abilities just being the same statistical upgrade, inadequate enemy diversity, inadequate weapon diversity, some basic supernatural abilities like telekinesis, flying and floating, the ability to turn enemies to your side, a shield. The level design is generally simplistic from a functional perspective resulting in all combat encounters being wave based shooter. The gameplay is weak and too much of a focus. The game is loosely architected similarly to System Shock in that it takes place in a facility with an elevator connecting the different levels. It should have had similarly excellent survival horror gameplay as System Shock 2 as well, which would've been more thematically appropriate. Now the story: it takes after X-Files and especially SCP. The Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) is a secret government organization that contains paranatural entities. The antagonist is one such entity, the protagonist is fueled by another. World building for FBC is good as you uncover research presentations, research paper, correspondence, and even a puppet show. Some of the scientific language is off, most prominently the use of "dimensions" which don't refer to spatial dimensions but really other worlds or universes. Technobabble needed refinement. A bit too much of the plot lies on a generic idea of "resonance", which is just an unidentified type of energy responsible for all paranormal stuff including the antagonist and part of the protagonist. Remedy really tries in the writing department, but has yet to deliver a masterpiece. Ultimately this is hard game to recommend, being 30 hours of weak gameplay.

I really wanted to like this game and for the majority of my time playing I did. However, there was an optional boss that crashed constantly and I spent an hour trying ever fix I could find on the internet. None of them worked. I had to turn on one shot kill in the settings and shoot the boss at the beginning of the fight before the game crashed. I was able to complete the base game without other crashes, but when I started the Foundation DLC, the game crashed several times. I looked for fixes online and what I could find recommended changing a setting in your bios. I'm not going to do that. The game is my favorite thing that Remedy has done, but I cannot finish it because of the crashes. It really is a shame, but I cannot recommend this game to anyone because of the frustrating technical difficulties I had with it.

You don't know how/why you die, and you get punished for it because that side quest you were doing before the mysterious death is no longer active. As annoying as it is to see health regen in every game, I'd rather have that + ammo than whatever system this is. I appreciate needing to collect health items...but this stupid charge system reeks of developer-dictated-play; I can't play the way I want to. So what if I want to use a weaker weapon against enemies? That's my right to add my own difficulty. Making it so that I will literally be unable to progress (I don't have health regen, but enemies do? TF?) unless I bend the knee to the playstyle the developers enforce on me. It only gets a 2nd star because it's gorgeous in RTX...but that's it. I'd give it zero+1, but I don't think zero is an option for leaving a review.

Pretty good game so far, I've got about 6 hours in it so far. This is the third Remedy game I've played (the first 2 were Max Payne 1 & 2). I like the gameplay, haven't gotten too far in the story yet. The minimum specs says you need a GTX 780, but I've got a GTX 1050 with 4GB VRAM in a laptop and it runs decently on 1366x768p. I have my laptop hooked up to an external TV that is native 1366x768, so the visuals are pretty good. I can play on high settings with ~30fps and on medium I get ~40fps. I have experienced quite a few frame drops in certain areas with the frame rate noticeably dropping to around or below 20fps. One thing I've noticed with the game that I'm not sure why it happens is that sometimes some areas will be chugging on framerates and I will close the game and relaunch it and the frame drops are nowhere near as bad. Overall it's fairly playable on lower-end hardware if you lower the resolution.