Control

 

Control is a game developed by Remedy, the famous developers of Max Payne known for their high octane third person shooter action. I had also previously played their other modern game, Quantum Break, and had mixed feelings about that one. But I had heard lots of hype around Control and of course I'll almost always be interested to play anything by this dev so I eventually got it for a cheap price without knowing anything about the game other than it has a female protagonist that uses super powerful abilities like throwing objects with your mind, or something, thats what I gathered from the odd trailer here and there.

There is no difficulty selection, the game just has one difficulty. I found that intriguing at the start.
You play as a female protagonist, known as, actually I don't even know her name. It's played from a standard modern Third Person perspective with controls you would expect. Standard running and jumping, moving around, presing X to interact with the environments, and so on. The game has you starting off going through these sequences of government agency office buildings of a sort, with a really strange and obscure weaving narrative about some leader guy (called the Director) killing himself, and somehow now you're the new leader/director person of this..government agency thing. Then you encounter some monsters known as "The Hiss" , usually they are just standard government soldier looking guys with red eyes and a bit of weird hazy fog around them that attack you on sight, but as the game progresses you encounter more and more monster types with varying levels of unique abilities. For the first bit of the game, you're taking Missions to go throughout this big Government agency complex, of various floors and Sectors. A problem that I was having the whole game is that theres a general lack of direction, and it frequently turns into a "Where the fuck do I go?" kind of game. Unlike other similar games in the genre, theres no hud marker of where to go next. There is however, a map you can pull up, but this map is atrocious and borderline useless.  It covers up almost the whole screen while its up, so you can barely look at it while navigating, it also is very vague on if you should go Up or Down to get to the marked icon, its just a mess and I never got comfortable navigating my way around the game. Instead of reyling on this map, you'll have to look around at the in game world for signs and try to navigate this place using signposts, but the game will often bar off areas with this Red wall until you kill enemies, sometimes. Its inconsistent, sometimes the red wall will have nothing to do with killing enemies, but breaking some objects or something. Its frustrating and I find myself walking in circles far too often doing nothing. Its funny because its not really the kind of game that rewards vigorous exploration, yes - there are slight RPG mechanics, almost feels like a case of "well, we HAVE to have RPG mechanics because every other game does!" This is trivial, simple stuff, like as you kill enemies and progress through the game you unlock points to put into basic things like multiple tiers of increased health, energy, and increasing your powers damage and stats. There are also "Mods" you can unlock, like putting attachments on your guns or 'Personal mods' to give yourself little buffs like more health, or better health pickups, or less energy used when Dashing or sprinting etc. But its very minor, almost unimportant stats and RPG things where I barely gave a shit about any of it for the whole game and only played around with it a handful of times and was relatively fine. So to reiterate: Its not like the game massively rewards exploration, so the argument of trying to say it would take away from the game to just have a basic arrow or indicator on the screen pointing where to go would "ruin immersion or exploiration" doesn't work. It just hampers the gameplay experience and adds unnessesary frustration , time wasting, and annoyance to navigate through this game. It doesn't help that almost everything in the game looks the same. It's all just various degrees of warehouses, office buildings, factory looking machinery. Thats it. There are a few dreamlike sequences where it goes into these fourth wall breaking 'Meta' floating cube areas, to be quirky and different or something, but these moments kinda just fall flat and feel lazy, like they didn't wanna bother making another level or scene, and gave you this barebones development blocks to pass as some dream sequence.

How about the core combat then?
You start off with just a basic pistol, you have infinite ammo but once the ammo counts down, it has a cooldown and slowly refills. At first its a very barebones basic shooter, enemies come out in waves, you spam them with your pistol, and thats about it. Theres no health regen, which is a questionable decision. Enemies drop health orbs that you can run over to refill, but by default you dont get much health from it, you need to use Mods to get more. Eventually (takes far too long) you start to unlock the other 'guns'. I say 'guns' because it kinda just shapeshifts from the pistol form into another slightly altered pistol form. Its pretty disappointing and not that fun, it feels like the game basically has one gun. The other guns I tried were not exciting or satisfying to use. This "Spin" gun that acts like a machine gun, but is inaccurate with bad damage and takes too long to reload. The Shotgun, which I used for a total of 2 minutes before realizing its shit because you cant get close to enemies in this game since there isn't regenerating health, and finally this Charge laser shooting gun where you hold down fire to charge it up and then release to do massive damage. I ended up using the Pistol and Charge gun the entire game, swapping to charge to deal with the higher armored and bullet sponge enemies. The guns were not satisfying or exciting, and the lack of variety or even 'real' guns was a detriment. Well as the game progresses you also unlock these like Superhero powers. Like the ability to grab random objects and throw them across the map at enemies. It seems like these powers are the games biggest selling point, and the main attraction. And yeah, the particle effects and physics on display here are satisfying, it does have a nice 'oomph' to it when you slam an enemy in the face with a massive block from a wall. I mostly used this ability in between the gun reloading, which is how its seems to be used. You can throw objects while the gun reloads, so its this rhythm of shooting guys and tossing objects that can get kinda fun and amusing to do. But for awhile thats all the game has going for it, lackluster gunplay, with this throw ability, and visually generic or unappealing office room after room and very annoying navigation with a shitty map system. Later on you unlock another ability, this float ability, that makes the game look really goofy. You just levitate across the whole map floating around like Superman or something and you have to use it to jump to various high places that aren't always marked in an obvious way, wasting more time. But thats really all the game has to offer in terms of its combat mechanics. I was actually expecting more from the powers, but the ones are offer are pretty unimaginative, but like I said, at least the physics system is entertaining enough.

The game has 10 main story missions, which get accepted automatically and progresses you through them automatically. You do, however, get tons of side missions, and can track them manually. I didn't bother to do a single one of these, as I wasn't really particularly having a blast with the main missions, so what are the chances wasting my time with side-content is gonna boost my enjoyment? Little chance. There are tons of them, though, like 40 something. And like I said, the game doesn't massively reward you for 'grinding' for XP or find new guns or unlocks, its just these unappealing Mods and basic bonuses skill unlocks that you get an abundance anyway, so the side content felt pointless.

The game also sometimes tries to be a puzzle game, and this stuff just sucked. It would jerk you around ,waste your time, to solve the must mundane uninteresting boring puzzles. Like basically "put round object in round hole" type stupidity. These flash card puzzles of interacting machines to line up the right flash cards, these stupid little door sequences where you have to match the square to open the door, these absolutely downright annoying and nonsensical Hotel sections where you go through the same hotel over and over and over throughout the game doing stupid, mundane little shit like adjusting a painting, ringing a bell, turning over a clock, backtracking and resetting the hotel 3 times and then magically a key spawns. Just why? What a fucking waste of time. I get its supposed to be this narrative plot point, but it just makes for annoying time wasting 'gameplay'. Other parts where you have to find the power boxes and slam them into the walls, a puzzle where you have to lock this creature into a room to progress, I mean its not always awful , its just very mundane.

And the narrative is really, really, nonsensical garbage. Let me touch on that...The game's story is produced by Sam Lake, the guy that did the Max Payne face. He was in charge to come up with this clusterfuck of a plot. I'm not gonna still here and like Movie review the script, thats not what I'm here for, but the plot is so pants-on-head-retarded that its laughable to try to follow. And its not just me. Someone was watching me play virtually the entire game, and they couldn't wrap their head around what the fuck was happening either. It all just seemed like a joke, almost like someone purposefully making fun of storywriting as a medium. None of it makes sense. Time travel, alternative dimensions, you killing yourself over and over, FBI government Spy sub plot, constantly breaking the fourth wall, this Projector thing transporting you to alternate dream worlds? The close-up zoom in on the main characters Sparkle in her eyes and the inner monologue, the extremely bland, lame, forgettable characters that all play it way too safe, the main characters motivation about finding her brother Dylan as if to say family is the most important thing in the world, wow how original (eyeroll) no depth, no nuance in personality...It all comes across as this tryhard, pretentious, joke of a plot, that I quickly found myself not giving a fuck about and mostly just laughing at it.

Oh yeah, the respawn system tries to take a note from Souls games or some shit, they give you these respawn points that basically act like Bonfires letting you warp around and upgrade skills. And if you die far away from these "control points" you lose minutes of progress spawning back at the last one. Theres no checkpoints or autosaves, you just go all the way back, again, pointlessly, uselessly wasting your time. I get that there should be a penalty for dying, but this is just tedious and timewasting, not punishing or challenging.

For much of the game I was sitting there muttering to myself "ugh, this is so fucking shit"  almost like groaning in pain at how annoying a lot of these sections were to get through. Mostly because of the respawn system, but also because the combat is genuinely fucking bullshit a lot of the times. Theres a very frequent thing where you will be fighting enemies , doing fine, then out of nowhere you'll just explode and instantly go down to 1% health. I still have no idea what exactly does this. And its a big problem cause its so threatening and hard to get health, you cant just cower in the corner and wait for it to come back. Once this happens youre basically fucked and can kiss your progress goodbye, going far back to the last spawn point. This happened a lot. Other times, the games graphics will change into everything having this bright shade of red, almost entirely obscuring the field of combat and any visual queues. There was one boss fight in particular with a guy called like Salvador or something, and the entire arena was red, and he would instantly explode you, but it was near impossible to see ANYTHING cause of this obnoxious red filter. The arena was also swarmed with dozens of enemies. This was a terrible, headache inducing, frustrating fight that took a dozen or so attempts. And it just felt like fake difficulty, mostly because I can't see shit. Finally beat him sitting back in a corner sniping him with the Charge gun...wow how rewarding. Theres one or two other boss fights in the game but they are barely worth mentioning, I can't even remember them. One guy near the beginning of the game is this floating guy that also, guess what, randomly explodes you, and is more tedious to kill more than exciting or challenging. I think these enemies also became regular occurrences afterwards, but with much less health it seemed like.

Not sure what else to say, the game uses real actors in some of the cutscenes which was kinda jarring I guess, but amusing. But like I said I just couldn't get into the pretentious, silly plot, it was hard to get invested or care. Even by the end of the game I just zoned out and couldn't tell what the fuck was happening anymore. Theres not really that many cool parts in the entire game, a few times you go into these alternate dimension chamber places of like giant bridges and cube worlds which I guess can be trippy in a drug fueled trip kinda way? Theres this one place with a Maze of Ashtray where it allowed me to progress there before I was supposed to, making me walk in circles for 30 minutes for no reason because the right wall wouldn't open up until I came back later, yeah thanks for that one.. Its like the in game map sometimes actually lies to you and tells you to go to the wrong place or just confuses the fuck out of you. So annoying. Later on I went there when I was supposed to and it was kind of an entertaining segment? This rock music played and the walls were opening up and going trippy, it was visually stimulating and almost fun, afterwards the character said to herself "That...was...awesome" Which kinda ruined it, though. Please dont tell me when the game is awesome, Game, its like a comedian saying "You should laugh now".

I had higher hopes that I would enjoy this game, being the developer that it is , with its history, but I don't know. I just could not get into this game very much. The graphics can be striking and visually impressive, with the RTX Raytracing feature and cranked settings, but its not this like mindblowing "greatest graphics ever" game that I've seen some people say, really the only impressive graphics is the physics and particle systems, and some of the reflections. The actual environments are pretty dull looking and the levels themselves are generic and bland. Even the last 'mission' just wasted my time. It turned me into some ordinary office worker where I go around delivering mail, packages, picking up coffee mugs. What the fuck? Again, I get its for some narrative reason. But the narrative sucks. When the game was over, it made me keep playing a bit in this new uniform, like "Hey, you can freeroam and do all the side content!" Yeah, not happening. But it did give me new main missions, which I thought was odd. I played for 20 mins or so, then I realized it automatically launched the DLC expansion. Yeah, also not happening. Maybe one day if I'm desperate to play something, but not anytime soon.

4/10