Control
Blissful confusion at it’s finest
To sum Control up I can simply, say it’s downright weird.
Just as you think you’re getting used to the level of bizarre, geometric, mind mess Control throws at you on the regular it throws you a curve ball in the form of a new enemy, area or quirky little side thing that adds a whole new ruleset into the mix.
Now don’t get me wrong and think that the weird is a bad thing, I bloody loved it. The game holds no punches when it comes to just throwing seemingly random information at the player and saying “lol, deal with that”. There’s no better example of this that how the game starts, You play as Jesse Faden who, after years of searching for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suddenly finds herself running the gaff. Or is it working for the janitor.. It’s one or the other.. or both.
Either way it’s a living.
After wandering into her new place of work Jesse quickly finds the current director of the Bureau having handed in his resignation in the form of a bullet to his own brain. She does what any sane person would do in that situation which is to pick up the gun he used and start blasting the employees. I should probably add some context to why she goes Rambo on the office thinking about it.
The basic premise of control is that a mysterious and evil presence named the Hiss has infiltrated the Bureau (a place of paranormal research and investigation) and started to infect the minds of the employees in an attempt to spread to the masses. The Bureau is in lockdown and Jesse has shown up to drive the Hiss out. This as you can imagine, looks a bit mad.
Standard Tuesday at the office
In terms of gameplay, on the whole Control feels satisfying, interesting and cool as heck.
The gun play feels satisfying although the controls are a bit odd. There’s no reloading so ‘R’ Switches shoulders which regularly caught me off guard every time I was in combat and suddenly looking the wrong way around the wall. ‘F’ changes your service weapon’s form, which looks awesome by the way, I’d recommend rebinding this to mouse wheel as I found myself forgetting what key switched forms. Or you could just not be an idiot like me and that’d solve the problem.
Swish
In terms of performance the game runs very well. I run a very modest RTX 2060 and still achieved very reasonable frame rates, that accompanied with DLSS pushes the performance far further than I expected it would, the game looks excellent, the smokey dimensional-y effects never fail to amaze and a few ray-traced reflections thrown in here or there help add another layer f polish to an already beautiful game.
That said there were one or two moments that let slip the illusion, occasionally dlss would forget that it was supposed to be rendering texture details and the Black Rock Quarry would be made of playdough until I paused and unpaused the game. There was also the occasional very brief slow down/ frame drops when initially loading into the game, but when I say brief I mean less than half a second so in all likelihood that would be completely negated by installing your game on an SSD.
My only gripe with the game would be the occasional random jump in difficulty. Sometimes when entering a new are or having a new enemy type introduced would feel a little overwhelming like I was missing a piece of the gameplay puzzle that I needed to make it through that section. For example, *Mild spoilers ahead* the end fight freeing Polaris/ Hedron, the Ashtray maze and the bastard fridge mission.
Now I’m going to rant for a hot second here, whoever designed that damned fridge mission is a sadist. For context there is a side mission in which you enter a realm via an altered fridge to fight a giant, cycloptic, creepy, caterpillar thing. This creature towers above you meaning you have to look up and shoot it in the glowy eye to deal it damage, in the meanwhile it’s firing orbs at you and smashing the ground around you with it’s creepy insect-y arms. The frustration I felt fighting this creature was more than I felt during the entirety of the rest of the game. The reason for this is that when the creature strikes the ground it leaves holes in the platform, while you have to look up to shoot it, do you get where I’m going with this? The amount of times I fell through these holes whilst trying to dodge balls and shoot the eye was embarrassing. I finally settled on just standing on platforms and floating about while shooting just to minimize the chance of falling to me embarrassing demise.
Final Thoughts
To say I enjoyed Control more than I thought I would is an understatement. It takes a lot for a story based, single player game to hold my attention these days and Control had me hooked. It’s a crazy and intriguing story wrapped up in a weird but beautiful aesthetic with a whole bunch of random little things that I’m sure I’ll never understand, but perhaps that’s the point.
I don’t understand all of it, and maybe I don’t need to.
Jesse Faden - Director
- Nathan Smith