Developed by Remedy Entertainment PLC. Published by 505 Games. The Remedy logo and Northlight are trademarks of Remedy Entertainment Oyj, registered in the U.S. and other countries. Control is a trademark of Remedy Entertainment Oyj. 505 Games and the 505 Games logo are trademarks of 505 Games SpA, and may be registered in the United States and other countries. All other marks and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
8.0/10.0 - Full price
8.5/10.0 - With discount
Details:
8.5 - Lore. Watch Alan Wake Lore before you play the game.
8.5 - Story. The story is similar to 90-s paranormal series.
6.0 - Gameplay. After few hours of play I turned on ingame cheats (all of them) and was just collecting collectibles, doing side quests and main quests and reading collectibles.
I'm not saying that the game is bad but I got bored playing it and the only reason I didn't drop it was lore and story.
If you thought that how could I got bored if the main character had paranormal powers. Well this is not the only game with such abilities i played in my life. Yeah it is fun to through boulders and performing super-hero landing but shortly it gets annoyed.
First let's address the elephant in the room. I am not happy with the state the game is in. How can Remedy have the audacity to release the game in this state? This is blasphemous! I experienced too many crashes, bsod, freezing in game, corrupted saves, and now I can't even play the game. Everytime i launch the game after the intro and logos it hangs. Before, it worked now it won't. Corrupted saves caused ctd. I had to delete a file in save location to fix it. I shouldn't have to tinker and it should work out of the box. Also the save from gog server was corrupted causing ctd. Luckily, I backed up my save. How can this game be 4 out of 5 star when it's this broken? This is disingenious. Check the reviews before you buy because I didn't.
Gameplay is pretty unique. You get a lot of powerups. At the start, you have a pistol but later you can craft and upgrade weapons such as shotgun, sniper, grenade launcher, machine gun. You have abilities allowing to hurl objects at enemies, levitate, use shield with debris, mind control, pull objects to create platform, and destroy objects. The premise is pretty interesting, very out of this world. Just think of the fbi mix with scifi is what you get with this game. You are the director who is looking for your brother at bureau or the oldest house. Your brother was taken away from you when you were both very little. Prior to that, you and Dillan came into contact with an object from another dimension and it changed both of you. When you arrive at the house, all hell brake loose. The employees are floating in midair spouting nonsense like they are possessed and extremely hostile when approached. The house is corrupted. It's up to you to cleanse its corruption. I can't even finish the game. Fix this hot garbage please!
As described by (some) others, you will likely not be able to finish the game. Others say this only affects the GOG version, but I am not willing to pay hundreds of bucks to compare one and the same game on different sales platforms. Suffice it to say, at some point in the game, it will crash, and after that, necessary scripts won't be triggered any more. The door remains closed, and that's it. Restarting the mission will not fix this, only complete removal of all save games and restartin the game from scratch. FRUSTRATING to the max - do not buy, save yourself.
So I first downloaded this game from the net to test it out. It kept crashing after 10-60 minutes of play but it was good enough for me to keep playing it. The game feels a bit like an early 2000's tps with a smoother gameplay and a cool atmosphere.
Thus I decided to buy it on gog despite the bugs. This version had the same issues and i had to start over but that was fine by me until i had 1 terrible idea. I decided to update my drivers thinking that it may fix my crash issue... and thus have been unable to play control for 10 days and counting....
So to keep it short:
1 Game is good (4 stars)
2 Bugs are to be expected (-1 star)
3 Create a safe point of your system before updating drivers (that one is on me)
The actual game itself is great, but I can't recommend this in good conscience.
I ran into three game breaking bugs in the course of about two hours. Firstly, the game hard crashed during a combat sequence in Mission 6 (My Brother's Keeper). This hard crash actually caused my PC to black screen and completely restart, during which the PC had to do an internal scan to check system integrity and my UEFI boot order got changed, causing my boot times to increase from less than 30 seconds to almost 5 minutes. That took some tinkering with to fix.
Secondly, this hard crash caused my save files to become corrupted. So, clicking on "continue" instantly crashed the game, with no crash log or error message. As a result, I had to use mission select to reload my progress back to the beginning of Mission 6.
And then comes the third game breaking bug. The reload took away any abilities, mods, materials, and levels that I had gained during my playtime of Mission 6, but it did not reload the loot boxes in the area. As a result, I was unable to gain any of the materials and mods that I should have been able to gain when replaying the early part of the levels. Moreover, because it wasn't truly a full reload, I wasn't able to correctly proc the side mission, "A Matter of Time." I was able to start the mission by talking to Horowitz, but I was not able to enter the Oceanside Motel because my level progress had somehow been saved and not overwritten, and because the puzzle was already solved, it would not progress the mission, so Wells would not show up and I was unable to continue with this mission.
I was actually having a ton of fun with Control until these bugs. But until they get addressed and patched up, I can't recommend that anyone buy this game.
