Control is a very wonderful, very well written game, any fan of Alan Wake would probably love this game's writing and all the setpieces and scenes Remedy sets up brilliantly.
I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.
I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.
To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.
The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.
As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.
The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.
But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.
The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....
The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.
Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.
There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.
Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.
The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.
Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.
Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)
Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.
They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.
Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.
The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.
I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.
I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.
I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.
To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.
The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.
As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.
The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.
But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.
The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....
The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.
Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.
There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.
Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.
The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.
Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.
Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)
Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.
They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.
Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.
The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.
I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.