Don't play this game. It is a technical mess. I ignored a friend talking about how buggy their playthrough was on PC thinking it was probably isolated, or even if it wasn't surely playing this on console this long after release with plenty of time for patches it would be stable. I ran into multiple obnoxious progression-blocking bugs. This game is broken.
With that out of the way, I'll actually talk about the game. Control's strongest point it has going for it is visual and world design. The game world is pretty consistently fun to explore and has a good amount of variety, it reminded me a lot of Half-Life in a good way. While I feel the overall world building as far as lore and story go is much weaker than people give it credit for, the actual visual and physical design of the world add a certain something to the game that I really liked.
The combat is nothing to write home about at the best of times but it's enjoyable enough, until you hit some random difficulty spikes and really start wishing that the game had a fucking dodge button or a competent cover system. This is compounded by probably the biggest issue in the game outside of the technical problems which is the checkpointing. Cleansed Control Points are yet another variation of bonfires in a game that really didn't need them. As fast travel points they work fine, but for a mostly linear game having these as the only checkpoints got quite annoying. You often have to make a lengthy trek back after dying, but this isn't through rooms with carefully designed enemy placements but instead through random respawning enemy encounters and repeated cutscenes that make it very annoying to just get back and retry a section you died on. This is especially egregious in side missions, which led to me skipping the majority of them.
The other aspect of gameplay that hardly deserves a mention is the puzzle sections, which never really go beyond walk around and interact with the interactable items in the room. I bring it up only to say that some of them were actually very frustrating despite the simplicity. One I was stuck at for a while I was convinced was just a path I couldn't go because the game never explained a mechanic properly, and I instead spent a long time banging my head against the other path through that area which was a combat section with a massive difficulty spike that it turns out I wasn't supposed to be doing. Another I got stuck on because the game just bugged out and wouldn't let me interact with something required for the solution. There's also a particular puzzle you encounter early on but can't solve that's built up for a while and I'd heard such praise for it that I was expecting it to have a very clever solution that you always could have done but just never would have thought of, but no, you just get an item late in the story that completely bypasses the puzzle. It's kind of a cool sequence I guess, but I really don't get why people loved it so much.
I've heard the story and lore get a lot of praise and I really don't think much of that is deserved. The lore and world building I might call amusing, but it's very surface level ambiguity to create a feeling of being mysterious without ever actually giving any answers, or having them in the first place. I really disliked the main story overall. I found Jesse pretty annoying most of the time, her internal monologue during conversations is obnoxious, as boring as nearly every other character you can talk to is. I was still curious enough to see if they answered any questions to push through to the ending, which was incredibly lackluster from both a gameplay and story perspective, and unsurprisingly answered nothing at all.
Overall there was a certain quality to this game that I enjoyed despite the individual pieces being very lacking, but a lot of it just doesn't quite come together and it's very lacking in polish.
With that out of the way, I'll actually talk about the game. Control's strongest point it has going for it is visual and world design. The game world is pretty consistently fun to explore and has a good amount of variety, it reminded me a lot of Half-Life in a good way. While I feel the overall world building as far as lore and story go is much weaker than people give it credit for, the actual visual and physical design of the world add a certain something to the game that I really liked.
The combat is nothing to write home about at the best of times but it's enjoyable enough, until you hit some random difficulty spikes and really start wishing that the game had a fucking dodge button or a competent cover system. This is compounded by probably the biggest issue in the game outside of the technical problems which is the checkpointing. Cleansed Control Points are yet another variation of bonfires in a game that really didn't need them. As fast travel points they work fine, but for a mostly linear game having these as the only checkpoints got quite annoying. You often have to make a lengthy trek back after dying, but this isn't through rooms with carefully designed enemy placements but instead through random respawning enemy encounters and repeated cutscenes that make it very annoying to just get back and retry a section you died on. This is especially egregious in side missions, which led to me skipping the majority of them.
The other aspect of gameplay that hardly deserves a mention is the puzzle sections, which never really go beyond walk around and interact with the interactable items in the room. I bring it up only to say that some of them were actually very frustrating despite the simplicity. One I was stuck at for a while I was convinced was just a path I couldn't go because the game never explained a mechanic properly, and I instead spent a long time banging my head against the other path through that area which was a combat section with a massive difficulty spike that it turns out I wasn't supposed to be doing. Another I got stuck on because the game just bugged out and wouldn't let me interact with something required for the solution. There's also a particular puzzle you encounter early on but can't solve that's built up for a while and I'd heard such praise for it that I was expecting it to have a very clever solution that you always could have done but just never would have thought of, but no, you just get an item late in the story that completely bypasses the puzzle. It's kind of a cool sequence I guess, but I really don't get why people loved it so much.
I've heard the story and lore get a lot of praise and I really don't think much of that is deserved. The lore and world building I might call amusing, but it's very surface level ambiguity to create a feeling of being mysterious without ever actually giving any answers, or having them in the first place. I really disliked the main story overall. I found Jesse pretty annoying most of the time, her internal monologue during conversations is obnoxious, as boring as nearly every other character you can talk to is. I was still curious enough to see if they answered any questions to push through to the ending, which was incredibly lackluster from both a gameplay and story perspective, and unsurprisingly answered nothing at all.
Overall there was a certain quality to this game that I enjoyed despite the individual pieces being very lacking, but a lot of it just doesn't quite come together and it's very lacking in polish.