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I’ll go on record saying that while I did enjoy Control, I didn’t love it. In certain parts, it was absolutely brilliant. The Ashtray Maze, of course, remains one of the best and most memorable third-person shooter sequences of all time, and the power trip of being Jesse Faden and just hurling literally everything in a room at enemies will never get old. That said, I always thought the shooting itself was kind of weak, enemy variety was lacking, and as cool as The Oldest House was as a setting, I didn’t love how much I had to constantly backtrack through it. So when Control Resonant was revealed and promised all of the weirdness and creativity of the first game, but recalibrated as a melee action game, you better believe that both my curiosity and interest were piqued. And based on an early build I got to play for about two hours, it was for good reason.
In my demo, I got a chance to play through three snippets of Control Resonant. The first was the opening sequence that covers Dylan waking up from the coma he fell into after the events of the first game, fighting his way out of The Oldest House for the first time since he was a child, gaining a handful of special powers and abilities, and then stepping outside into a Manhattan that has been overrun by The Hiss, the paranormal viral resonance that should have been contained within the walls of The Oldest House.
The second part of my demo jumped me ahead to about 10 hours in and let me play around in the open-ended Extraction Zone. We unfortunately weren’t able to capture any footage of this area, but it served the purpose of giving players a place to run around, pick up and complete sidequests, and search for treasure chests containing various resources that could be used to further upgrade Dylan’s abilities.
You’ll also travel through the Extraction Zone to reach the more linear main missions, which are reminiscent of the various wings that you’d explore in the first Control. I only got to experience one of these missions, which made up the third and final section that I got to play.
In it, Dylan descended deep into a sinkhole to plant research drones at the bottom, using a lift that would periodically get interrupted by the pesky Hiss. In order to get the lift moving again, I’d have to clear out all of the enemies in the area, which highlights one of the interesting design decisions about Control Resonant’s combat encounters – basic fodder enemies respawn endlessly, so if you’re just thoughtlessly swinging your sword around cleaning up the small fry, you’re going to be spending a lot of time doing so. In order to clear the encounter, you need to defeat all of the tougher elite enemies, marked by large red circles on your minimap.
Once the elevator reached the bottom, I had to utilize Dylan’s unique mobility options to place the aforementioned drones in specific spots all around the room. When it comes to movement, Dylan can hold down the jump button to do a high jump and glide, then pair that with a short double jump, and finish it off with an air dash for a bit of horizontal movement. Combining all of those techniques made it so that Dylan could cross gaps between buildings that you’d expect to see in an Incredible Hulk game.
The coolest sequence in the Sinkhole mission though was after the lift crashed and Dylan had to find a new way back to the surface. As you follow a glowing cord illuminating the right direction, eventually the plain subterranean landscape shifted into the interiors of a looping apartment where you had to follow the direction of a song and a blue light emanating from a TV. Then you turn a corner and all of a sudden you look out to see a vista of hundreds of open apartments arranged almost like an opened up dollhouse, where once again, you must use the music to guide your eyes to the one room with the blue TV. In the next area, the apartments are no longer just in front of you, they’re above, below, some are sideways, some are upside down, and yet the song still persists, guiding you towards the exit. It’s all very surreal and very apropos of what we’ve come to expect from Remedy, and especially from Control.
A Resonating Frequency
So what does it play like? Well, it’s a fast-paced melee action game with a heavy emphasis on wide-open combat arenas. There are tons of enemies all over the place, both on the ground and in the air, and there’s a big focus on giving the player a wide variety of toys to play with to craft their own unique expression of combat. There’s not really a single game that I can point to in terms of what it feels like, but if you can imagine the frantic, never-stop-moving, relentless action of Doom 2016, mixed with a faster style of Control’s floaty acrobatics, and a healthy dose of Devil May Cry mixed in for good measure with the way you’re able to launch an enemy into the air and stick to them with a combination of air combos and a variety of cancels, you’d be in the right ballpark.
Instead of just equipping a single melee weapon, Dylan is actually able to equip a total of three, but they’re all used for different things. You have your standard weapon which is used for quick attacks, a subweapon that generally does more damage but requires a bit more finesse to make up for its downsides, and then you also equip a weapon for your finishing move, which is essentially the final hit of your standard melee combo. My main go-to loadout involved using two swords as my standard weapon for dealing quick damage and clearing out fodder enemies, a massive hammer that could be charged up for big damage, and gauntlets that would do heavy stagger damage as my finishing move. I loved using the hammer in particular as it let me do my favorite Devil May Cry technique: aerial cancels! I was able to charge up the aerial hammer attack that normally would send me crashing back down to the ground, but by cancelling that animation with a jump, dodge, or ability, I could remain in the air, still targeting the enemy in the air. It’s not quite as stylish as DMC’s enemy step jump cancels, but still very satisfying and effective to pull off.
Where the combat gets really interesting is in the special abilities that Dylan can employ. You can have two sets of three abilities active at any time and can hotswap between them with the touch of a button. In my demo I only got to see five of them, and they included a telekinetic rock throw, much like what Jesse used in the first game; a ground slam, also much like what Jesse used in the first game; a ranged pyrokinetic attack that could inflict the burn status ailment, a powerup that constantly drained Dylan’s ability meter, but gave all of his attack burn damage; a telekinetic push, and a rock shield that could be used both defensively and offensively by dodging through enemies while it’s active.
Between the three weapon types, abilities, skill trees for each of those weapons and abilities, build-altering artifacts, and more, I feel pretty comfortable saying that Control Resonant will have a fairly flexible combat system that lets you tailor your playstyle to your liking. You could lean into just doing raw damage, make a build that focuses on staggering enemies and opening them up for executions, one that focuses on rapid hits to make more frequent use of your combo finishers, and a mid-range build that utilizes the whip sword subweapon that deals five times the damage if you’re able to hold and release the attack button at just the right time. Even in just two hours of play with a limited selection of abilities, weapons, and artifacts, my brain was putting together loadouts that had good synergy.
As I briefly discussed earlier, one of my main issues of the first Control was a distinct lack of enemy variety, and while I can’t say for sure how the full game will turn out, at the very least I can say with certainty that you’ll face much more visually and mechanically distinct enemies than in the first game. One segment in the Extraction Zone had me facing off against a giant bus with Hiss-infected zombies spilling out the windows; another section had me fighting literal vending machines, and in another sequence I had to chase down a cloaked monster all around a mind bending arena that let me change the direction of gravity to walk on walls and ceilings. I hope they can keep up that creativity in enemy design throughout the whole game, because you can have the best combat system in the world, but it doesn’t really mean much if the enemies aren’t actually fun to fight. Fortunately, thus far, Control Resonant doesn’t seem to have that problem.
Control Resonant is shaping up to be exactly what it looks like: more Control, only designed as a melee action game as opposed to physics-driven third person shooter. And so far, that’s an incredibly potent mix. The real question is whether or not Remedy can keep introducing new weapons, abilities, and interesting enemies at a steady pace throughout the whole adventure. So far though, I’m definitely vibing with its resonance.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
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https://www.ign.com/articles/control-resonant-hands-on-preview
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