So right off the rip, I loved Control. I didn’t play it until the DLC started coming out, but it was spectacular. Incredible visuals, amazing world-building and story (though, highly derivative of the SCP concept), absurd set-pieces, and juuuuust horror enough for my tastes. If I had any criticism, it was that navigating The Oldest House was often more trouble than it was worth (though, understandable), and that it played like hot garbage as it shipped right at the transition between console generations.

Control Resonant – despite not having a 2 in the title – is a direct sequel picking up 7 years after the events of Control (naturally, as the Remedy Connected Universe seems to take place in real time). The Oldest House has been under siege by The Hiss for all this time (as we saw first-hand and first-person in FBC: Firebreak) but things have gone more-sideways-than-usual: The Hiss have broken containment and something is happening to Manhattan. Before Jesse takes off to figure it out, in one final move of desperation she binds an object of power to Dylan by jamming a giant vibrating shard of paranatural metal into his chest, finally waking him up from his coma.

So, again, Dylan is a stranger in a strange bizarre incomprehensible and hostile land. He’s familiar with the FBC, but has no context of what’s happening because he’s been unconscious and/or possessed and/or kidnapped by the FBC since he was a kid. Furthermore, everyone around him is wildly untrusting of him, since last time he was awake he murdered hundreds of their coworkers. Good hooks all around: Find Jesse. Stop the Hiss (for good, hopefully). Figure out what has cut Manhattan off from the rest of the universe. Redeem yourself, by showing you can be useful and are in control and can be trusted.

What’s new? Uhhhhhh… nearly everything. For starters, it’s no longer a… uh… whatever genre Control was. What genre even was Control? Third person… Remedy Game? I mean it’s not a shooter. It’s not survival horror. Action-Adventure?? The Catch-All Genre? Well it’s easier to parse here: Control Resonant is an open world beat-em-up, it’s like if Prototype took place in Inception.

While Dylan is a new protagonist, Jesse catches him up with many of the basic traversal skills she picked up over the course of Control pretty quickly, so in very short order you’re hovering everywhere, dashing, dodging, double-jumping, etc. Signature abilities like telekinesis also return promptly, but it absolutely does not stop there: each region introduces even more mind-destroying traversal skills and abilities as you progress through regions I kept referring to in my head as “The Barf Zone”. Every region is just a different kind of Barf Zone, culminating in the Ultimate Barf Zone.

As a beat-em-up, it has everything you’d expect from a beat-em-up. It’s got like 20 different skill trees to upgrade your weapons, passives, and skills. You’ve got one massive tree for all the passives, then three for each of the primary weapons, then three more for each of the heavy weapons, then like 8 more for all the finishers. Sounds great, right? Well, none of it matters. The weapon trees in particular felt completely meaningless to me. Given the options presented to me I chose the scythe light and drill-spear heavy, on the theory that I’d like to have a broad attack for dealing with groups of trash and then a heavily-ramping attack to focus down beefier enemies.

Yeah, so I never swapped off these weapons. It was perfectly effective. I spent the whole game doing the exact same attack pattern. Find the largest enemy (since trash mobs spawn endlessly until you take the big enemies out), do the three-hit drill combo, build up enough falter to execute, executions trigger the overpowered state, use that to proceed to the next beefy target or quickly clean up the trash. I did this the entire game. The only change I made to this was to add a buff to the opener. That was it. There were no amazing new combos I opened up. There were no amazing skills to chase. At some point I stopped reading what any weapon skill upgrades even did. All that matters is that weapon upgrades increase your overall power (effectively gear-score but without gear), and it doesn’t matter if you’re doing an end-game upgrade or a first-tier upgrade, or if it’s on a weapon you’re using all the time or one you’ve never equipped, it all upgrades your overall damage output exactly the same.

The result of this is that combat – which is most of this game since it’s an open-world beat-em-up – is incredibly one-note. Can you intentionally pick your weapons and skills? Sure. Do they matter? Not really! Is there any incentive to swap them around? Not really! Is there any incentive to pick one tree node over another? Not really! If none of this stuff matters, why is it all here? But… does it matter that it doesn’t matter? Think back to Control. Once you got telekinesis, and could chuck filing cabinets at will, did you actually use anything else? I certainly didn’t! Every encounter, filing cabinet, filing cabinet, gun until while you recharge your filing-cabinet-juice, then – you guessed it – more filing cabinets.

In Control this felt fine, but I think it felt fine because Control wasn’t “about” the combat. Control was about the mystery, the exploration, the puzzle solving, feeling just weak enough to be concerned. Here, though, it feels… not great. Just zoopin around, navigating zones, finding your non-euclidean route from point a to point b, you’re doing a lot of combat, way more than in Control. So when the combat feels one-note, it’s a very long and very repetitive note.

It’s very weird. The traversal feels amazing and varied. It’s snappy, it’s responsive, and you have opportunities for player expression by how you choose to use these skills. By the end of the game you’ve got an expansive set of abilities and both can use them all at-will and are expected to use them together in interesting combinations, all while parsing and navigating an increasingly convoluted world with distressing geometry. It works and works amazingly.

But in between all that traversal is combat, and the actual mechanical combat feels good, it’s punchy, it’s visceral, your choices in how to parse and tackle a given encounter matter. Similar to traversal, it’s snappy and responsive, it never feels sluggish, it’s perfect… but it’s the same thing every encounter. It doesn’t matter what mobs you’re fighting, it doesn’t matter where you’re fighting them, it doesn’t matter if you’re floating, or they’re floating, or they’re a bus, or they’re charging at you, or you’re charging at them, or you’re on the ceiling, you can do the exact same process no matter what.

I don’t know what they could have done to make this better. More enemy variety? More complex combinations of weaknesses / resistances between enemy types? More combos? I don’t know. Maybe that would have just made it more frustrating because it would’ve been more stuff to juggle in your head.

Enough complaining about that, time for other complaints. As an open-world game, there are way more puzzles sprinkled across the zones to have something to do, some way to receive more greebles for upgrading all those skills. Since there’s more puzzles, obviously they’re not all going to be bangers. They range from “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other” to “Examine this room and use context clues to discover a password” to “Esoteric Incomprehensible Garbage, where you can tell it’s a puzzle, but can’t remotely comprehend where you’re even supposed to start”. More often than not it’s the first option, two whole classes of events that repeat across all the regions fall into that category. Some of the more engaging puzzles have a great mix between exploration (gotta find ’em in the first place), traversal (gotta figure out how to get to them), and then navigation (gotta figure out how to position yourself so you approach the right way), and those are neat, but there’s nothing that calls out exactly where they are so that sorta sucks.

So. Is it good? It’s not bad, but they’ve made some truly perplexing game design choices. There’s some amazing improvements in mobility, traversal, just how snappy everything feels, and I think they even made some meaningful improvements in environmental design too. There’s only so much you can do with “brutalist federal office building but Wrong”, and in Resonant they go places leading to significantly more variety. Plot-wise it was fine, it went interesting places and had some neat revelations, but I don’t think they stuck the landing. It’s not like the end of Control where it just sorta ends (well, and then ends again), but it still wasn’t great.

I have certainly played worse open world games, and I have played worse third-person beat-em-ups, and I’ve even played a worse Control game. I can still recommend it, just not highly. It’s not bad, it’s just not what I hoped I’d be getting from a Control Sequel. Recommended.