Control

Playtime: 19 Hours

Finished the main game and all 19 of the accessible side missions; did not touch any of the DLC, nor do I have any interest in doing any of it down the line. Fully upgraded all weapons except Pierce (mostly used Shatter/Charge by the end), a little less than halfway through upgrading Jesse & her powers (maxed health, energy, launch). Game played on the default "difficulty" settings - didn't use any Assist mode options.

The first time I tried playing through this game, I had some pretty lofty expectations of the world and the story based on the general sentiment I saw about them online. Instead, what I found was near-incomprehensible writing, a stale world in a brutalist architectural style, and characters that both looked and acted like something lurking deep within the depths of the uncanny valley. That caused me to quit the first time, but having decided to try it again more recently with corrected expectations, I enjoyed it as a whole much more. All the previous points are still more or less valid; the writing and story never get any better, with it more or less being the same incomprehensible fetch quest until the end, where it crashes into a brick wall in trying to bait out possibilities for DLC or a sequel, which leaves it feeling incomplete. It doesn't really help the point that so much of the dialogue is interspersed with Jesse's inner monologue, which is relevant to the story (Polaris) but breaks up the pacing of conversation very awkwardly. The world doesn't really get more interesting, but at least the theme is consistent; I did find it weird that about half the game is spent in maintenance though. Lastly, characters actually got worse later into the game - Jesse looks awful in motion and Emily Pope looks a bit off, but Arish and Langston actually look like aliens with human-face rubber masks on. Lots of it probably has to do with facial animations, which are universally terrible and make Jesse look like a gorilla.

With all that said, I think the gameplay heavily carries my opinion of this game. Playing on the PS5, the performance hit a stable 60FPS the entire game, though it seems like some lighting and shading may have suffered as a result; lots of areas either looked completely blown out and far too bright, else far too dark. Thankfully, the movement and shooting mechanics weren't affected - the game feels a lot like Returnal in gameplay, which is a very good thing. Control has some of the tightest-feeling movement in any third-person game I've played recently, and shooting also feels fine too. Additionally, the powers in this game, while fewer in number than I expected, each feel very good to use, and generally don't have weird or shitty behaviors attached. For example, you can seamlessly levitate while shooting, launching stuff, and even while seizing and converting enemies; the lack of movement-restricting actions (outside of some interaction prompts which are generally done out of combat) made this game quite a joy to play.

That's not to say that the gameplay is flawless, however. Enemies were able to frequently spawn in strange locations (or in some cases right behind Jesse), which feels like it belongs in Serious Sam but not here. Most of the time, there is a really distinctive red aura effect that occurs when enemies spawn but I was still able to miss it on occasion... that's probably my own inattentiveness though. Enemy damage values are all over the place as well. Regular enemies are almost completely harmless, being programmed with very low accuracy and dealing only minor damage even when they do manage to strike Jesse. However, any explosives or launched objects do absurd amounts of damage, with many of them capable of health-gating Jesse after only a couple of hits. Also note that enemy rockets home in on Jesse, the enemy ranged mold guys also fire homing bolts that are almost invisible, and even Jesse's rockets seem to home in on enemies. From my observation, splash damage is completely uniform, with anyone that is even barely in range taking full damage; though this may be a bit petty given that it benefits the player greatly too, perhaps even more than the enemies.

In closing, I liked this game far better once I basically ignored any semblance of plot or character, and focused completely on the gameplay where the game shined. The blase world did still eventually take its toll though, as I started to tire of the same environments, fights, and enemies a little over halfway into the game. The side missions weren't much to speak of either - only a couple of them like the esseJ and Tommasi fights were really worth remembering, and others like the Former fights I wish I didn't remember at all. By the time I actually finished the game, my gut feeling was mostly gladness of it being over, with no interest whatsoever in continuing to touch the DLC (which apparently connect with some of Remedy's other games?), nor the "Expeditions" game mode which is basically just a difficult time trial - I only did a single one to fix a bug with one of the sidequests, where I found it entertaining but not worth doing again (I did just barely make the time limit with 4s left, which was pretty exciting).