I finished Control last week, likely the best game to marry a creepy funhouse with a sprawling government office that you’ll ever play. I was up and down on this one for a few months. There’s a fun narrative and plenty of atmosphere, but I wasn’t always enjoying the gameplay.
I hadn’t played a Remedy game since Max Payne 2. The shift from comic book-style storytelling to something literally cinematic was a change for me, but I was still able to comfortably slip into the narrative right away. I particularly enjoyed what was going on with the meta-narrative. For example, I’d get so damn lost running around even with signs everywhere. Normally, the existence of the signs would feel like a change implemented after tester feedback, but then I would see stuff like “Janitor’s Office” and think there’s intentional thematic design at play. Constantly questioning that in various elements of the game was part of the fun.
Unfortunately, my tendency to get lost wore my patience thin eventually, and the new gameplay unlocks bored me. It was a blast at first–I haven’t had this much fun with telekinesis since Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy forever ago–and the gunplay felt solid. But then, as more of the weapon options showed up, I didn’t click with any of them and preferred chucking rocks. It’s also a great looking game at times. This is the first game where my system has been able to handle more than basic ray tracing, but I’d get a lot of blurry textures. I even had to rollback my video driver to resolve a problem with the cinematics. It’s weird to call a game where I’d get a solid 60 FPS a rough port, but I think this qualifies.
I picked up the game again last month and made some more progress until a certain late-game section completely stonewalled me. I simply didn’t have enough health (or damage output, or both) for the encounter, and the choice was to either grind for skill points/mods or start looking at difficulty options. I quickly found a switch to an “Easy” difficulty wasn’t possible but there was an Assist Mode. I started with reducing incoming damage, but after a couple more five-minute attempts I was frustrated enough to turn one-hit kills on. I couldn’t tell you the last time I did something like that to get through a game. It was either that or likely drop the game permanently (a shame being that close to the ending). Still, I’m glad I kept playing, even if I’m not entirely sure in the end Control kept its end of the bargain. I don’t think the story quite stuck the landing.
Any thoughts on Control? I seem to be down on it more than most. I imagine Remedy fans in particular got a kick out of it. Or on a game that pushed you into cheats or breaking another gameplay tradition you have?
Nah, Control was gameplay wise jank. I see in fact more and more modern games with terrible takes on encounter design. I grew up with frame tight games. They were at times brutally hard and speed runs do end there with deaths to normal mechanics. However you could systematically learn the timings, patterns in a pleasant way until you got it right. You might fail at them crushingly, but you know quickly a no-hit run would be possible and truly unfair situations are quite rare even on the highest difficulties.
Not so the past few years it seems. The gamer press lets many games get away with actually terrible game design. Off camera attacks, bad tells, awfully tight frame windows, multiple enemies which can on a dice roll attack unfairly together into undodgeable situations and so on. And while I do think the extremely tightened game design I prefer limits creativity, I do expect from those games who make it a bit wonky at times that they know their place about it and loosen the demand on the player.
Quickly the criticism on this gets drown out by the hardcore “git gud” crowd which probably never went past half the game. And then there is another fraction of players, who learn to cheese the systems as in exploiting high DPS outputs to reduce the interaction with the encounter design.
Back to Control, yes, I was similarly very frustrated by some gameplay sections and the story doesn’t pass a basic writing course test. It sets up this wonderful intrigue in the beginning and then forgets that a story needs something like stakes and tension. And towards the end it just drips along until it ends.
What specifically did you find janky? Except for the one CTD bug I encountered (and spent hours fixing) everything seemed pretty fair. I completed all ten main story missions with no major issues with difficulty. I died some, but was always able to figure out a way to approach each encounter that made sense and didn’t require exploits.
I’m not some elite gamer either; I’m a 41 year old dad.
There were bosses with camera problems (off camera tells).
As Whitelight explains enemies with bad tells doing 90% damage. Enemy design is overall bad, because it is the same approach https://youtu.be/hUGi07a0Mi0?si=37k8ldzolqPvt08_
Quote from Darkhack on the negative Steam review:
" Sadly, there are too many minor faults that manage to interrupt the fun. The launch ability that lets you throw objects can be unpredictable. Most of the time, Jesse will grab a nearby object or even pull rubble from the floor if nothing is available to throw at enemies. However, it’s not uncommon for the ability to glitch. At random moments, Jesse will inexplicably grab an object all the way across the room and wait for it to be pulled in and arrive at her side before throwing it. These objects can even get stuck on random geometry. I died more than once because Jesse decided that the desk located a mile away was the only suitable object to throw and she would wait for it to arrive while under heavy fire. That’s assuming it arrives at all and doesn’t get stuck along its path."
I think high damage mechanics are always a terrible idea in a physics based combat rule set instead of a restricted, openly telling system like in Mega Man or Final Fantasy XIV.