CONTROL Resonant Review

Remedy finally lets you swing a weapon instead of pointing one, and the switch pays off in almost every way that matters.

You already know what Remedy does when it releases a game: it feels like an event, because the studio never repeats itself, even when it's working inside a world you've already visited. Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and the first Control all leaned on strange, layered stories while keeping their gameplay relatively simple, and that formula worked because the mystery was always the real draw.

Control itself came out in 2019 and turned into one of the more talked-about games of that year, built almost entirely around one location, the Oldest House, and the paranatural secrets buried inside it. You played that game as Jesse Faden.

Jesse was thrown into leading the Federal Bureau of Control after finding its director dead. Meanwhile, she tried to track down her brother, Dylan. He'd been taken from her as a kid. The bureau's chief scientist had locked him away for most of his life. 

By the end, Dylan had been overtaken by the Hiss, an invasive entity that turned him into the source of a small massacre inside the bureau, and Jesse only put him down by tapping into new powers an ally called Polaris had gifted her. That's the baggage CONTROL Resonant picks up, and it does something Remedy hasn't really tried before.

It drops the shooting almost entirely, opens up the map, and asks you to fight with your hands instead of a gun. On paper, that sounds like a risky pivot for a studio known for narrative puzzle boxes rather than combat depth, and it is a gamble, but it mostly lands.

You start CONTROL Resonant seven years after the first game ended, and things have gotten considerably worse in that time.

The Hiss never left the Oldest House; the bureau has been trapped inside it under lockdown the whole time, and Jesse has spent seven years fighting a losing battle to keep it contained. In a moment of desperation, she drives a piece called the Aberrant into her comatose brother's body.

She disappears, leaving Dylan to wake up alone in a Manhattan that's no longer recognizable. A second Altered World Event, referred to in-game as the Patterning, has folded the city in on itself, twisting streets and buildings into fractured, dreamlike versions of what they once were.

You're handed control of Dylan as he's released from captivity as something close to a last resort, distrusted by nearly everyone around him because of what he did while possessed, and tasked with hunting down the resonant entities responsible for tearing the city apart while also trying to find his missing sister.

A recap plays early on for anyone jumping in cold, and while it gets you up to speed on names and events, actually having played the original still makes the emotional stakes land harder. Zoe, your handler over the radio, becomes one of the story's better parts almost by accident, since her banter with Dylan and the way their dynamic shifts over the course of the campaign give Control Resonant a warmth the first game never really had room for.

Dylan's painful backstory gives that emotional warmth real weight and depth.

Digging into Dylan's childhood in Ordinary, Maine, his years of imprisonment, and his complicated relationship with Jesse turns him from a background character in the first game into someone genuinely worth rooting for, and by the time the credits hit, CONTROL Resonant delivers one of the more satisfying character arcs Remedy has written.

Dialogue choices don't branch the plot in any major way. Still, they do let you shade how Dylan comes across, whether that's genuinely kind toward the people who resent him or a little colder and more guarded. That flexibility adds a personal layer to scenes that would otherwise just be exposition.

One quest thread built around alternate timelines and old childhood video games hit harder than expected, mostly because it treats its reference points as an actual emotional throughline instead of a wink at the audience, and it's one of the better examples of the sequel using its lore to say something about the people trapped inside it.

The overarching plot leans on a few conveniences to keep the pace moving, and it's more conventional than what Remedy usually goes for, but the character work and a handful of genuinely surprising twists more than make up for it.

Combat in CONTROL Resonant runs through the Aberrant, a shifting hunk of metal that becomes whatever weapon fits the situation.

A scythe for sweeping hits, a pair of quick close-range weapons for critical damage, a hammer for breaking through armored targets, even a whip-like form depending on how you've built Dylan. Rather than swapping gear manually mid-fight, the weapon automatically changes shape based on whether you're doing a light combo, a heavy attack, or a finishing move. 

Hence, the flow of a fight never really stops to let you dig through a menu. Alongside melee, Dylan can eventually equip up to six special abilities at once, everything from telekinetic pushes and elemental effects to summoning minions that fight beside him, and mixing and matching those loadouts changes how each encounter plays out. 

Movement is where CONTROL Resonant really separates itself from anything Remedy has made before. Dylan dashes, glides, double-jumps, and eventually gains the ability to shift his gravity so he can run along walls or treat a ceiling as the new floor, and stringing it all together.

At the same time, chaining attacks makes traversing the city feel closer to Prototype or inFAMOUS than anything in the first Control. Dylan moves through the air with a looseness that isn't floaty or sluggish; it lets you weave between enemies and cover ground quickly, and it's easily one of the strongest things CONTROL Resonant does.

The actual fighting leans entirely on aggression, since there's no blocking or parrying to fall back on.

Dodging is your only defensive tool, but timing it well opens a short window for a counter and, depending on how your skill tree is built, can slow things down or grant temporary buffs. Enemies have a falter meter that fills as you land hits, and once it's full, you can execute a finishing move that grants a buff called Dominance, which changes how health drops work for a short stretch afterward.

Normally, killing an enemy drops health for you to pick up, but a falter kill skips that in favor of the buff, so you're constantly weighing whether to chip away safely or go for a riskier finisher that pays off later. It creates a real back-and-forth in how you approach fights.

That's especially true since most encounters throw a mix of enemies at you: a tougher target alongside smaller ones. Those smaller enemies keep respawning until you take down the bigger one. That means you're usually better off ignoring the small fry. Instead, you focus on the real threat.

CONTROL Resonant is genuinely difficult on its default settings early on, before you've unlocked enough tools to keep up, and there's an assist mode with sliders for damage taken, damage dealt, and dodge timing if you'd rather tune the challenge down without losing the ability to see the story through.

Boss fights, called Resonances here, are some of the game's best-looking encounters.

Each is visually distinct and tied to the surreal art direction Remedy is known for, though many boil down to long health-bar grinds once you've seen their patterns a couple of times. A few late bosses lean into aerial fights that the movement system wasn't really built to handle cleanly, and the targeting doesn't always cooperate with the camera in those moments, which stands out as one of the rougher patches in an otherwise strong combat loop.

Outside of combat, the environmental puzzles scattered through CONTROL Resonant are fair once you're actually standing in front of them, usually solvable in ten to fifteen minutes through things like carrying an electrical charge between receptacles, spotting an object that's glitching out of sync with its surroundings, or working through shifting, Rubik's-cube-style rooms.

The real issue isn't solving these puzzles; it's finding them in the first place. CONTROL Resonant gives you very little direction, sometimes marking a broad area without pointing to the actual trigger you need, and it's easy to walk right past an objective without realizing it, then spend a long stretch backtracking through areas you've already cleared.

It's not uncommon to lose the better part of an hour just trying to figure out where the next story beat is hiding, and that friction shows up again with fast travel, since you have to physically walk to an unlocked travel point rather than jumping there from the map screen, which turns simple backtracking into its own small chore.

Some of this eases up once you've unlocked higher-tier movement abilities and can launch yourself over obstacles instead of hunting for the right route.

Still, the early hours of CONTROL Resonant demand patience before the payoff arrives. Progression in CONTROL Resonant ties together a skill tree, weapon upgrades, and craftable gear, and none of it locks you into a single playstyle. You earn skill points steadily.

You earn them through story missions, side content, and defeating Resonances. Respeccing costs nothing. So experimenting with a build never feels like a wasted investment. That's true whether you focus on summons, sneak damage, or raw offensive power.

The Aberrant itself gets upgraded along three tracks, covering your main combo, your heavy attack, and your finisher, and a separate currency called Source funds both weapon upgrades and passive Artifacts of Power that grant resistances to things like burn or Mold damage.

Vendors show up as roaming ice cream trucks scattered across each zone, and leveling them up unlocks better gear over time, giving you a reason to explore instead of beelining for the next marker. Character level is tied to defeating Resonances and clearing zone content, and staying under-leveled makes fights noticeably harder. Hence, the open structure of CONTROL Resonant rewards you for wandering rather than punishing it.

Crafting exists mainly to forge equipment pieces and doesn't go much deeper, functioning more as a support system than a highlight.

Visually, CONTROL Resonant is one of the more striking things Remedy has put out. The city itself, twisted and folded by the Patterning, gives you streets that shoot straight upward and areas where solid ground sits above your head, and shifting between these planes mid-fight is disorienting in a way that mostly works in the game's favor.

Running on the Northlight engine, CONTROL Resonant handles all of this without buckling, staying stable across dozens of hours on high-end PC hardware. Destructible props and debris react convincingly to combat, even if some static elements like pillars and street trees stay fixed in place, and the overall art direction, especially in the back half of the story, produces some of the most memorable imagery in any Remedy game to date.

The map has improved over the original Control's notoriously bad one. However, it still doesn't convey verticality well in a world built almost entirely around vertical spaces, which contributes to earlier navigation issues. The audio side of CONTROL Resonant holds up just as well.

Combat sounds are sharp and easy to read even when a fight gets crowded, voice performances land the emotional weight of Dylan's arc, and the soundtrack mixes original composition with licensed tracks you can collect as physical discs within the game world, with a flute-driven score that shifts tone smoothly between quiet character moments and full-blown combat chaos.

Sound design carries that same weirdness into the game's stranger side content.

Audio logs can play in the background while you keep exploring or fighting, instead of freezing everything to read text, a small touch that makes sifting through the world's lore far less disruptive. The sound design tied to a strange entity called the Board stands out in particular, layering warped, unsettling tones that fit right into Remedy's usual brand of weirdness.

That weirdness, honestly, is still very much present throughout CONTROL Resonant, even with all the focus shifted toward combat and traversal. Side content includes plenty of odd stuff. You might chase down a runaway stroller across rooftops.

You have to sing through a life-or-death karaoke sequence. You can help a cat take on Hiss enemies. A spot-the-difference puzzle inside a taxicab leads somewhere else entirely. And you can poke around a place called the Museum of Curiosities.

It's stuffed with odd paranatural junk, including a coffee machine that probably shouldn't be sentient. None of it feels like filler, and it reminds you that even with a completely different combat system under the hood, this entry hasn't lost the tone that made the studio's earlier work memorable.

There's also plenty left to do once the credits roll. 

You can jump straight back into the open world afterward. That lets you clean up leftover side content or hunt down remaining upgrades. You can also push into a New Game Plus run on a harder difficulty. Best of all, you won't lose your build.

A lot is going for CONTROL Resonant: strong character writing, some of the best traversal in a game like this in years, and a world that constantly finds new ways to surprise you. A few boss fights drag on. But given everything else, those feel like a fair trade-off rather than a dealbreaker. 

CONTROL Resonant takes a real risk by throwing out a formula that worked for Remedy and building something almost unrecognizable in its place. It comes out the other side as one of the studio's strongest overall efforts, even with a navigation system that fights you more than it should.