If you missed this game on the previous consoles, now is the perfect time to buy as it contains everything plus RTX and more importantly, it is a fantastic story that draws you in and drives you on. If you are a fan of The X-Files or similar genre shows, material… I have no doubt you will enjoy this. An exceptional job from the whole team!
Not being able to carry over save data is a
huge drawback. However, we enjoyed
uncovering the bureau’s secrets all over
again, with ray-traced drama. [Issue#186, p.88]
Originally played this on PS4 but had to stop after 3 hours because the performance wasn't up to scratch (frame rate issues). But on PS5 it's great! This game is fantastic. It's a perfect balance of simplicity and depth. Graphics are great, story is good, gameplay is fantastic, character progression (skill tree) is actually meaningful and changes the whole dynamics of the game. Very fun, very playable. Got the platinum trophy!
I did't know what to expect from this game. But I certainly didn't expect it will turn out to be a weird, braintwisting and utterly unique masterpiece. Courtney Hopes performance als Jesse Faden (the main character) is spot on, perfect voice acting and I love Jesse as a character. The game has great story telling with humor and lots of suspense as well as masterclass world building (documents and audio recodings). Not to mention the amazing graphics and the very unique art style (reminds me of Stanley Kubrick movies with all that geometry, lighting contrasts and 60/70s interor and technology). There is clever level design, detailed decoration and realistic enviroment. The fighting system is really cool, the combination of superhuman powers and shooting with different kind of weapons mix quite fine and lead to exciting fast-paced-battles. The sourroundings react to your actions really nicely (things break, explode etc.). Overally Control has a really well made atmosphere with build up suspense, psychological horror elements and firghtening enivorments. But it manages to never get too scary, just the right amount. I really liked the insane attention to details (adding so much additional stuff like very long handwritten texts or forever ongoing voicelines add to the world immersive feeling). The ashtray maze level on its own is a gaming masterpiece, one of the best video game missions ever. The length of the game is just right, for people who really liked it Control even offers two quite good DLCs. In addition to that I have to mention the flawless programming: there is an impressive high quality of effects and physical behaviour of objects, I never encountered bugs or graphical errors. The sheer amount of documents, audio recordings etc. especially the ones that are linked together shows me Remedy really put a lot of effort and love into this game. What I have to criticize is that raytracing looks stunning on the PS5 but feels weird and too irritating since it produces a stutter and blurring when moving the camera. Another minor problem is that enemies are too repetative and mostly the same (except the mold zombies which I think feels like a nice hommage to TLOU). Fighting parts always feel the same wave style, there are no tactical aproaches and only rarely different situations - I wish for the sequel to improve in this aspect. Another improvement for a sequel could be to move the weapon form choosing to the directional buttons of the controller, this would make it possible to choose from more different weapon forms fluently. You find weapon mods and personal mods too often, they really stuff in the inventory and are mostly useless since most are weaker than the ones you already have. The translation of the documents or subtitles into german is sometimes quite poorly, I started with english audio and german texts but soon switched to both english since a lot of the humor or cleverness of the texts is lost in grammatical errors or obvious google translator mistakes. One thing that set me off was that you sometimes instant die when falling off a cliff, this ruines the game flow. Personally I think the ending felt too rushed, it would be better to leave the player a break before the final fight - I was confused and surprised to find myself in the final battle all of the sudden. Overall control is a really outstanding game. It shines with its creativity and innovative ideas. The only big flaws for me are that I personally can't use the raytracing mode because it makes me motion sick and that the enemies get too repetative after some time. Still its very uniqueness and amazing setting, story and world design make it in my opinion a 10/10 masterpiece.
My first experience with Control was underwhelming due to my base PS4 not being powerful enough to do this great game justice. Now I wish I waited for the next-gen version. The Ultimate Edition finally looks and runs as it should (however, if you want ray tracing, you’ll have to accept 30 FPS) and also offers two expansions that tie the story to Alan Wake. [04/2021, p.34]
The Ultimate Edition is definitely the best console version of one of Remedy’s finest games. But even with all DLC included it lacks the fidelity that you can get on a high-end PC.
Control Ultimate Edition on PS5 is still a great game, and its enhancements are pleasant - Ray Tracing or 60 fps, it's up to you - even if we could have asked for something more with the DualSense. If you've never met Jesse Faden and never been to the Bureau, it's time.
Without being a graphical revolution, Control Ultimate Edition's Next Gen patch freshens up the game a bit and gives good reasons to discover Jesse's paranormal adventures on PS5 or Xbox Series. The quality of life and immersion improvements are welcome, but the focus should have been more on solving some of the original game technical problems.
How can it be that they don't put an indicator to know where to go? When I started playing it I said "this game is wonderful" but as the first missions went by I realized that it's totally boring, I spend hours going through the map without finding the place where I have to go to progress, I haven't been angry in a while so much with a game but I'm not going to give it a bad score because of this.
I was looking for a good game to forget my problems and I came across this game that drives you crazy
This games biggest problem is repetition and the boring level design
. I completed this game from some years ago on the PS4 and I had fun so I played it again The characters are not interesting. They're just talking about the lore and there's not really any development and the gameplay gets tedious after a while because you just doing the same thing and because it's all grey blocks the level the sign it gets boring for eyes.
After awhile, I just had to ask myself if I even wanted to finish this game and I have to say no because i just get too bored.
Do you like the colour red? How about one-dimensional combat and endless office environments? Well buckle-up, as Control is still not the game for you. I am perplexed at how a shiny crimson gloss has subverted proper scrutiny of this very dated game.
One of the selling points of Control is graphics. I only played on performance mode and the 60fps did largely hold up, so credit where it's due. However, there's not much else positive about the graphics. The awful level design means you're going to be seeing a lot of repetition. The majority of the game plays like an office simulator with endless clinical corridors. It's a nice touch that the environment is quite destructive, but this is a one-dimensional gimmick that wears off its novelty fairly quickly.
As I mentioned above, when environments are not bland or dark, they are nauseatingly red. This is to indicate the presence of 'The Hiss' similar to corruption seen in HZD. Used sparingly this could have been great, however in its abundance it becomes irritating as it also makes enemies and traversal more difficult to navigate. Having said that, the PS5 is clearly what Control's graphics were designed for, not the PS4.
The gameplay of Control grinded my gears quite a bit. The first thing that flabbergasted me was the map and level design. This is bewilderingly awful. The map is an incoherent mess; it's incompletely labelled and despite being messy still isn't detailed enough to tell me where I'm going or how to get there.
This is where the level design has earned great scorn from me. The levels are simply far too vast, repetitive and empty. This is much more prescient in the early hours, as the game starts going outside the box in the final stages but is too little to late by this point. The game is a cross between an office and a factory, with some supernatural elements thrown in. Prepare for long, meandering levels where you fight the same enemies and complete basically the same tasks for 70% of the game.
However, the cardinal sin for me is that the layout of the game is so bad that mission instructions that are also vague left me wondering where the hell I was meant to go or how to get there. I resorted to online guides so many times; sometimes my own cluelessness, however mostly due to the bad level design. Some people say they enjoy the blind exploration however I do not enjoy having my time wasted like that when exploration provides scant rewards.
I will say one bittersweetly positive thing about Control's gameplay, and that is the accessibility options. Without these there is no way I would have completed level 3, never mind the main game. Immortality and one-shot kills were essential for me to get through the bad and repetitive game design to see if there was anything actually rewarding about it.
The final levels do start thinking outside the box, but as mentioned above there was no likelihood of me getting that far, making me think developers themselves were aware of the game's limitations. Kudos to them for accessibility, but it only highlighted to me the bad game design.
Another of Control's selling points is the telekinetic powers. Whilst these are very fun at first, the aforementioned repetition really sets in quickly and one-shot kills are far more helpful and faster. People seem to laud the psychic powers but it's not exactly ground-breaking or new.
When it comes to the story, I think they seriously screwed up here as well. Prioritising atmosphere, mystery and ambience really backfired for me. It led to serious pacing issues, as a good 50% of the game you're hearing random diatribes with little meaning. Then in the final levels everything is thrown at you but by this point I was skipping cut-scenes out of boredom. Had the game been better paced and less obsessed with being an X-Files-Resident Evil Sci-Fi combo I would have enjoyed the story. I think the story pacing could have held up had the rest of the game been enjoyable, but as you can see I didn't enjoy any aspect of the game.
Overall, the only control necessary here was my controlling my patience with this game. The critical acclaim it has gathered makes me think it just isn't to my tastes or there isn't enough critique or scrutiny in games. One final thing I'd like to highlight is a worrying trend that we're seeing a lot of upgraded PS4 games appearing on PS5 when I would much rather have some fresh innovation appropriate for what we call "next-gen".
SummaryAfter a secretive agency in New York is invaded by an otherworldly threat, you become the new Director struggling to regain Control. This supernatural third-person action-adventure game will challenge you to master a combination of supernatural abilities, modifiable loadouts and reactive environments, while fighting through a deep and un...