Beaten: Sep 17 2021
Time: 7 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X

Control feels like it doesn't exactly know what it is. What it's about, where it's focus is, hell even what kind of game it is. Somehow, despite being one of the shortest AAA games I played this year, it felt bloated and meandering. The only thing I can say about it for sure is that it banks on sounding deep and mysterious very hard to get you curious about its world, and it never got me going at all. At almost all times it felt like Stranger Things starring adults, minus the nostalgia. Make of that what you will.

First I guess let's talk about what kind of game Control actually is. There's like, three styles of game mixed in here. The first one is the base: it's a third person shooter at it's core, like Gears of War or Vanquish. Actually Vanquish is a good comparison for a few reasons, but the first one is that where Vanquish got a lot of it's combat design from character action games, Control goes halvsies on superhero games. Infamous, Prototype, hell Jesse Faden (the main char) could star in her own open world version of New York City if she wanted to. That's where the moveset comes from. The encounter design itself is pretty much straight out of Gears of War, which isn't a bad thing. GoW has great encounter design. But when the other genres start coming in, that's where my issues come about?

It's also (kind of) a soulslite. That is, a soulslike game but without the punishment. It's in the way checkpoints work, to the metroid-ey style of the world design, to the rhythms of the combat. For any enemy besides the basic ones, you're gonna be dodging projectiles like they were swords held by the Capra Demon. It's a good idea, and not a bad mix once you get there, but you don't get an evade until halfway through the game? And so many enemies have hitscan weapons too. I'm not sure it works, but it's probably the most inspired part of the game. In general you're a little too fragile and the enemies are a bit too annoying for my taste, and none of the guns feel great, but at worst I'm meh on the combat, and once or twice in there I did have fun with it.

The bigger issue is the amount of combat. You'll fight waves and waves of enemies on your way to things, often blocked in each room for like, 5 minutes fighting, just to get to the next room where it's the same thing, repeat a few more times and you'll be at your objective. I got tired of it like, 3 hours into the game, and it's got such a huge amount of side content that's just more combat (and lore, i'll get to that) and I just can't imagine wanting to do it.

Maybe I'd want to do all the content if I was more into the world here. The game takes place in the Federal Bureau of Control, who basically research all the weird stuff in the country. Basically they're the SCP foundation, but less militarized and more government office building. It's not a bad idea, but something about it just feels so familiar. Maybe it's the SCP foundation like I mentioned, maybe it's Stranger Things' ever-presence these days, or maybe it's something else that's slipping my mind but I feel like I've seen this story a million times, and the only new ground broken here was the presentation.

Speaking of, that part is pretty fantastic. The environments at their best feel like large modernist sculptures and paintings, all clean lines and right angles and domineering colors. The normal office building parts are also pretty good, nice and detailed and all that. At it's worst, however, there's no effort made for naturalism in environment, with offices being designed like levels first and places where people presumably worked second, yet sporting all the drab "government building-ness" that so many games have used to better effect. Worst of all however, is the toll this presentation took (and still takes!!!!) on the game's playability.

This game came out two years ago and it's still buggy as hell. My friend started it at the same time as me on his PC via gamepass and it crashed so much he had to stop, and even on my Series X I had major audio glitches for the entire back half of the game. It's definitely come a long way in playability (aside from the pc gamepass version) but for it to still be in this state? With this budget and manpower and time behind it? It's just ridiculous.

Besides the bugs, it just feels like a game that tried to be too much at once, without all that much at the center. I'm really disappointed with the story in that regard, it just feels like a flashy way of telling a story whose stakes are never made clear and whose themes are nothing more than weak implication, when they're coherent at all. It's not as artsy as it thinks it is.

Reviewed on May 25, 2022


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