GAME REVIEW: Control (X-Box One S)

 (The Great Divide - Seven Lions)

Released in late 2019 from Remedy Entertainment, 'Control' is a game that is, ostensibly, all about taking it back.

The control, that is.

Remedy invites you to explore The Oldest House, a place of constant change, mysterious power, and paranormal danger. Sound interesting? Just watch the bonkers release trailer:

If this looks like your bag of tea, read on! But ware ye: The Oldest House is not a friendly place to your player...or you.

To start, I'll pose two very relevant questions: What makes a great game? Pondering this question leads to a few obvious answers: Good gameplay, a solid story, appealing graphics and audio, and overall polish.

Next question: How much of each of those items can you sacrifice before the game is no longer 'great'? It's this second question, more than the geists and mysteries that fill The Oldest House, that truly haunts 'Control'.

You play Jessie Faden, the newly minted Director of the Federal Bureau Of Control, a secret agency established in the '60s to deal with Ghostbusters-level weirdness. You and your brother, Dylan, experienced what the game calls an Altered World Event when you were both younger, one that resulted in the FBC appearing MIB-Style and vanishing your brother. You ran, avoiding detection.  Now,  years later, you've come back to the FBC to find him...and maybe some answers about what, exactly, took place when you were children.

The story in 'Control' is lush and filled with details, but Remedy handles this pretty much flawlessly. The game's primary plot is disclosed to you organically in such a way that you end up knowing -enough- to take you to the next objective, but not all of your questions get answered. If you want to know more, the game gives you the option to pursue that additional knowledge through collectable files, audio and video logs, and wonderful conversation options with various NPCs within the world. Because of this, you're never left wondering what you have to do and have the choice to learn and do more or less at your leisure.  This is a wonderful mechanic that developers have screwed up OVER AND OVER AGAIN. 'Control' doesn't answer every question. When all is said and done, there are a -lot- of questions still unanswered. In a word this detailed and rich, that can be a dangerous balancing act. What is 'enough' information and how much effort do you want your players to have to go through to get at it? I certainly don't have the answer but Remedy Entertainment seems to; 'Control' is pretty much perfect in this regard.

Audio and video in 'Control' are also both pretty much perfect for what the game is. The game builds its sonic world primarily through sound effects and in this, it's incredible.  You're not supposed to feel comfortable in the game. You're supposed to be off balance, on edge. The sound design accomplishes this without fail, and it does it without having to result to jump scares or other cheap theatrics.  It's a slow, steady, Hitchcockian burn. There's no real music to speak of but the game doesn't suffer for it at all.

'Control' has gameplay that's very status quo for a third person over-the-shoulder shooting platform. It's pretty much exactly where you'd expect something like this to be given how many other titles with similar gameplay styles have hit the market over the last decade. Where 'Control' distinguishes itself in this space is the unique gameplay elements it introduces once you pick up some of the game's more creative power-ups. One of the major gameplay mechanics involves your player being able to telekinetically manipulate objects in a combat scenario. It's all very 'Jedi Knight' -- or perhaps 'Sith Lord' is more appropriate given how absolutely nasty you can get with some of the objects you find in the environment. Light-side or dark-side, you can be sure that the Force is very, VERY much with you in this game. A huge piece of how 'Control' realizes this has to do with the game's most stand-out achievement: It's physics engine.

I want to be very clear here: 'Control' has, without a doubt or question, the best physics and terrain/object engine I've ever seen on ANY console before, and pulls absolutely no punches in letting you use and abuse it. It is the most enjoyable and realistic sandbox I have ever played in to date.  It is a masterpiece. Anyone of a certain age will remember what Half-Life 2 did for in-game physics when it came out. It was a landmark achievement that future games are STILL drawing from. Nearly 20 years later, what Remedy has managed here is of the same calibre. It's THAT good. It's THAT MUCH more of a leap forward.

...Unfortunately, this monolith of technological advancement comes at a cost. 'Control' is a game ahead of its time, technologically. While it can be made to run on current (PS5, Series S/X, PC) systems and last-gen consoles (XBone One/S/X, PS4), last gen systems are just not cut out to play the game smoothly. This is a fact that the game hides really well during about the first hour of gameplay. It hides it so well that, even on current-gen systems, there's really no difference in gameplay or effects. Once you gain the ability to really tear the environment up with your telekinesis, the game's demands on your system's hardware escalate -dramatically-.  There are serious problems with frame rate in certain situations and the game struggles to render textures or draw distances in a timely fashion. This would be bad enough except that the game also has significant issues running into the VRAM ceilings of last gen consoles, resulting in game crashes that are far too frequent to be excused.  THIS would be bad enough, except the game has some of the most truly biblical load times I've ever seen.  Like, 'Mass Effect 2' on the 360 loads times.  Like 'Bloodborn II' load times. Current Gen consoles clean almost all of these issues up -- PC players with robust systems have the best experience by far, unsurprisingly -- but those systems aren't exactly widely available. This brings us back to that second question I asked: Just how much of a game can be sacrificed before it's no longer a great game? 'Control's stability issues are robust and frequent enough on last gen consoles that it's hard to urge people to play it.  That said, I still have no regrets about struggling through it, so I suppose that answers my own thoughts about 'Are the hassles worth it?' For me, they are.

I'd, uh...I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking really hard about trying to buy a current gen console JUST to make this gameplay smoother though. And perhaps that's most telling of all.

If you watched that trailer and thought, 'Wow, that looks kind of cool!' I can assure you, it's not 'kind of' anything.  It's incredible. As long as you're willing to pay the cost.