Control Resonant review – A wonderfully weird and ambitious action RPG

Thought you were done with the Hiss after fighting your way through 2019’s Control? Think again. A calamity has struck Manhattan, releasing the Hiss from the Oldest House. Things are grim, forcing the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), Jesse Faden, to take drastic measures. That results in the awakening of you, Dylan Faden, her brother. As a parautilitarian, you might be Manhattan’s only hope. And there’s also the matter of finding your sister, who has seemingly gone missing.

Needless to say, Control Resonant has close ties to its predecessor, so it’s wise to have played it to get the most enjoyment out of it. It’s still accessible to newcomers, though, with a handy recap video available via the game’s main menu to get you up to speed with previous events. And in terms of gameplay, while some elements will be familiar to those who have played the original Control, there’s a considerable shift in combat. While Control had you shooting your paranatural adversaries with a shapeshifting gun, here you’re combating them with a shapeshifting melee weapon.

There’s another major change, too. With the Hiss escaping from the Oldest House, and other unknown forces coming into play, you’re now free to explore Manhattan, giving you much more freedom. The Metroidvania elements still remain, though, and by hunting down Faults across the city you’ll gain a variety of traversal manoeuvres that will allow you to access new areas and make getting about a hell of a lot easier. Well, for the most part, anyway. Some of the traversal skills you acquire here, like being to manipulate gravity, can seriously put your head in a spin.

Other elements of Control Resonant can do that, too. Put your head in a spin, I mean. As you’d expect from Remedy Entertainment, this is a game that marches to the beat of its own drum, being weird and dark and yet strangely comical all at the same time. And it doesn’t hold your hand, either. So, while you will spend a lot of time traversing Manhattan and doing battle, there are also some tricky puzzles to solves and numerous gameplay sections that will test your sense of navigation. Good luck trying to power up a set of generators while manipulating gravity and dealing with time anomalies frequently change your position, for example.

But it’s this weirdness and creativity that is perhaps Remedy’s greatest asset, elevating Control Resonant in the face of numerous issues that can cause frustration at times. Getting around Manhattan can sometimes be a pain when you’re not exactly sure on the route you need to go to reach your destination, at least in the early hours, but then you might stumble upon a side-quest in which you encounter a possessed karaoke device and then all will be forgiven.

In any case, the fractured and warped world design here may not be the easiest to navigate, but that just makes it all the more unusual and appealing. And once you’ve got your head around things, gained some more traversal skills and unlocked some fast travel points, further poking your nose around each zone available becomes very enjoyable indeed.

Combat is another element of Control Resonant that you might initially have doubts about, but it eventually blossoms into something much more engaging and rewarding. At the start of the game you’ll have to choose a form for your weapon, with options including what are essentially dual swords and a scythe. With only a basic combo available to you at that point, though, dealing with enemies can stat to feel repetitive rather fast.

Thankfully it doesn’t take long for you to unlock a secondary weapon, giving you more options, and after that you can also unlock a range of combo finishers. By hunting down and defeating powerful bosses known as Resonants you can acquire a range of paranatural abilities, too. Hours into Control Resonant, then, you might be hurling rocks at your opponents before moving in to slice them with your scythe, batter them with a giant hammer, and then jumping into the air to return back to the ground to finish them off with a ground pound.

What’s really neat here is that while there are numerous ways to grow more powerful, from upgrading your weapons to spending talents points on an expansive tree, if you do find things a little too difficult, or you simply want the game to have less of a combat focus, you can dig into the game’s assist features to tweak a large number of parameters. You’re in control of how much damage you dish out and receive, as well as the window for performing things like perfect dodges and more.

You can even make the game harder for yourself if you wish. And no matter how much you tweak these assist settings, Control Resonant doesn’t penalise you. You can still earn achievements and trophies, with Remedy acknowledging that there are various reasons why you might want to play with them. Whether it’s for accessibility reasons or you’re only playing for the story, Remedy just wants you to have a good time.

Playing on PS5 Pro for review, throw in the fact that Control Resonant both looks and performs great, which is especially impressive considering how chaotic the action can get at times, and you have one of the most memorable experiences of the year.

There might be the odd occasion where you’re left scratching your head because Control Resonant doesn’t hold your hand, and perhaps the combat could be a little deeper, but all these little issues you might have with this fantastic sequel typically fade away as you progress or fall in line with the Remedy way of thinking. And between its ambition and creativity, you’ll be hard-pushed to find a game that’s quite as enriching and rewarding to play when it’s firing on all cylinders.