Gameplay looks boring and the acting is outright
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Control - supernatural third person action-adventure from Remedy
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Gameplay looks boring and the acting is outright
it is because the ign player or playing like a pregnant cow. i can see it being very mobile and fun and max payne-y if a competent player plays it. i just watch like several minutes of footage in the middle, but it seems like the gyy just play it too safely and have aim like a deaf bat. it looks like it allows you to go blazing and rely on dodge / wide span of character movement instead of hiding behind cover like the guy did.Gameplay looks boring and the acting is outright.
Oh C'mon face it the old Remedy is long dead. This is just another "inoffensive" shooter customized for the dumbasses and game journous. They couldn't even bother hiring a talented main actress with a shred of a personality!
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
Character animations are really good. How many games have such high production quality these days?
My only worry is the A.I.
I hope these gameplay videos are in lowest difficulty settings because AI is too rigid and frozen.
Wunderbar
Arcane
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that's a still image.Character animations are really good.
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
sullynathan
Arcane
Terenty
Liturgist
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- Joined
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Cross
Arcane
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I can already tell this game is going to be a disappointment. There doesn't seem to be any hip fire, which is dumb by itself, but it's even worse in a game like this, since it means the powers can't interact with the shooting. E.g. you can't telekinetically lift an enemy towards you while spraying him with bullets, or use him as a human shield while you shoot another enemy. You could do those things in Psi-Ops.
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The whole notion that you fly around with a chick throwing shit around inside boring environments is dumb by itself.
I'd have really loved an Alan Wake sequel, but nooo...
I'd have really loved an Alan Wake sequel, but nooo...
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
This gonna be better than AW.
AW had most boring gameplay of all time.
AW had most boring gameplay of all time.
But it had suspense and good writing. CONTROL has nothing of this.
Yeah, I got a new higher-res monitor which kind of required me to get a new card. Got a really nice 2070 model when they plummeted in price after the Super releases.
sullynathan
Arcane
You pretty much did this in psy ops without flying and playing as a dude but it was fun
Imagine the vast outrage if the inverse was announed.
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- 97,479
Getting solid reviews: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-08-23-control-review-mid-century-postmodernism
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/08/26/control-review/
https://www.pcgamer.com/control-review/
Control review: Mid-century postmodernism
Out-of-office experience.
Giddy action and astonishing art design combine in one of the great locations of modern video games.
It spoils nothing, I hope, to reduce a game as luxurious and uncanny as Control to just four words. Here goes, then: Hell is an office. Remedy's latest takes place inside the Oldest House, the austere, echoing and inhumanly vast headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. The FBC is an agency that deals with unusual horrors and is, as of your arrival, in the process of being overwhelmed by them.
Let's start with that frame, because the location's an enduring delight and the main source of Control's considerable appeal. Even before things get properly strange, The Oldest House is a marvel, a Masonic temple of the mid-century modern. The whole place is equal parts Barbican Centre and plate glass University. Hallways echo. Floors are glossy and perform gorgeous puddle-effects with the simple click-clack of a heel. Concrete looks like concrete and wood looks like wood. Atriums are so roomy they feel distinctly troubling, like negative-space Mayan temples. You always feel stuck deep, deep underground, in the Oldest House, cut off and dizzy from the sheer weight of implied darkness that is massed overhead.
References matter in any office job, of course, and Control has the best. It has taken a leaf or two from House of Leaves. It has spent time in the basement with Escher and Schiele. And it has lots of Kubrick on the CV. The lighting and volumes are plucked from Dr Strangelove, with blinding overhead illumination giving nearby geometric forms a sharp-edged blackness, while distant areas dither into smokey shadow. The carpeting is fresh from the Overlook. Even 2001 gets a nod, and let us say no more of that here. (Remedy has always been one for the nods and the in-jokes, but Control suggests a finer balance than normal in this regard. We are a long way from Alan Wake, in other words, which begins with something like, "Stephen King once wrote...", and so an arrogant novelist has given his first line away to another novelist, which always felt rather unlikely.)
The world is big and you are small, and wonderfully there's no BioShock golden arrow or on-screen waypoint to tell you where to go as the missions send you from one department to the next. Instead, you have to read the environment, follow signs, and find your own way. It's first day of the job territory, and you slept through the orientation.
It helps here that, underneath the Cthulian horror spilling forth and pooling, Control's darkest shame is extreme neatness. This is secretly a very tidy game, with a central hub linked to the rest of the complex by a single elevator. And it helps that as you progress you open up control points that allow you to heal and restock and upgrade and fast-travel between nodes. But still, it's genuinely wonderful whenever you take a wrong turn on your way somewhere and feel a very real-world panic set in. I'm a little bit lost, aren't I? Everywhere is well signposted - the signs themselves add a great deal of character to the place: Luck & Probability Labs, Ritual Division - but it's still nice for a game to leave getting where you want to go up to you.
(Yes, this does mean there's a bit of backtracking involved, incidentally, and occasionally a difficulty spike will leave you some distance from a respawn point. This is annoying! But I wonder if it's also just a consequence of what Control is trying to do: give you a world that is daunting, that feels strange but also real and governed by its own inscrutable rules, and in which you have to pay attention to where you are. So much of what the game is conjuring would be weakened, I reckon, if the team made it a little more spatially forgiving. Control exerts control.)
The Oldest House is a knife-edge construction, in other words. Its scope is the scope of myth, but its detailing speaks to the homely old 9-5 toil of an earlier generation, walls of punch cards and rows of desks, elevators, as the poet said, to drop us from our day. It's spooky even before it starts to change. But the more you push forward, the more the world begins to shift and recalibrate itself around you.
It's beautifully done. Down in the basement the office plants have escaped from their polite concrete sarcophagi and have started to reclaim the walls and ceiling, making a swamp of the floor. Employees dangle in mid-air, arms limp and heads bowed. Further south a furnace room is home to a gaping mouth of flame that is so bright, so overwhelmingly yellow, that it was a relief to get out of there. My skin seemed to tingle. It is Moloch's realm: wordlessly I understood this. Elsewhere, a bottleneck of baddies will stain the air a Marnie red and, once they're cleared, the walls will Rubik's Cube themselves about a bit, opening out the space, one world reclaiming another, rejecting another. This is a kind of concrete that has tides, it seems. It advances and retreats, and it is a reliable pleasure to watch it move.
It's a world of finishings as well as scale. Along with those signs pointing to departments like Para-kinesiology, there are rooms of antique lab equipment and there are sextants gleaming in display cases. There's acoustic tile, coal seams, old AV equipment like reel-to-reels and projectors, rooms of plastic stacking chairs politely gathered around a yellowing screen and an OHP. All of this adds up. The Oldest House creates a cumulative sense of the dangerous wonders of research, of the dark side of curiosity.
And this is all the more powerful for being delivered largely straight. There are funny moments in Control - and if you dig deep in the collectables you will discover some excellent fancies - but on the very top layer there are few tedious jokes about the jaunty paradoxes of corporate life booming from every speaker, and on the walls there are oil paintings depicting darkly studious former employees, a smug hierarchy, rather than lame riffs on motivational posters. You get a sense of a wayward and addled heritage rather than a bunch of threadbare stand-up routines telling you how lame it is to have to wear a tie every day. And anyway, you don't need that kind of stuff to make a game playful when you can kill someone with a photocopier or a lunch bench, or when you can send blizzards of paper raffling through the air just by looking at them. Control's obvious delight in - and stubborn defence of - its own fictions is completely intoxicating.
Speaking of killing people with photocopiers, the bulk of what you actually do in the Oldest House orbits around combat. And combat, I will be honest, took a while to click with me. There was a sense, in some early battles, that Control might simply have too much taste and poise to let itself go. The rooms seemed too big, the threats too small. It was like a diorama of fun rather than the real thing.
I shouldn't have worried. As you level up and get used to your abilities, and as the game's particular thrills seep into your marrow, Control's battles become truly hilarious.
And they're built from such simple pieces. Control has a handful of different enemy types and as the game progresses it often just throws them together in new configurations. There are basic weapon grunts, flocking in hallways, gathering in corners. But they are soon joined by ragged floaty guys who explode, floaty guys who lob things, ground-based guys who lob lots of things, icy weirdos who...
These things warp in with streaks of red light and expire in spectrum blurs that bring to mind the sickly rainbows of a migraine aura. At its best, Control chucks threats at you that have real style. I'm particularly fond of a large glassy sphere rimmed in colourful light that gives off health buffs as it zips around and always makes me feel I am shooting at old Gary Numan cover art. Elsewhere, though, the visual design of the baddies cannot match the Oldest House.
In terms of whittling these guys down, one of Control's central gimmicks is a single gun - the Service Weapon - that can become many guns over the course of the game, shifting and recombining in your hand to move between machine pistol, shotgun, charged sniper shot, rocket launcher. Besides unlocking new forms for the gun you can also collect and add mods - you can mod yourself too - which flare each build in specific directions. It's fun enough, and the crafting resources have brilliant names: Undefined Reading, Corrupted Sample.
Excellent sound design complements the Service Weapon's modular, voxely form, but in truth your best weapons are the kind of thing that you can find in an old Viking catalogue anyway. This is because the gun is designed to be paired with your growing suite of supernatural powers, the first and greatest of which is Launch. God, Launch is great. It's so simple, a squeeze of the bumper grabbing an object from the nearby environment before you heft it at whoever you fancy taking out. If there's no object available, Launch doesn't mind: It will simply pull something jagged out of the ground or the walls for you and you're still off to the races.
Launch is soon joined by a dash move, the ability to seize weakened enemies and have them fight alongside you, and a few other tricks that I don't want to spoil. All of these can be tweaked with their own skill trees, which generally offer incremental power boosts but chuck in the odd twist now and then. (Launch can be powered up so you can heft really big stuff, for example, or heft actual people.)
And, like the Service Weapon, which offers infinite ammo but needs a recharge period after each clip, powers are, well, powered by a separate stock of recharging energy. The aim of the game, in other words, is to manage and balance these dueling cooldowns, shooting only when you can't afford to chuck anything, and vice versa.
To Control's credit this never feels like clinical meter-wrangling. Rather, it encourages you to be creative, to take risks, to think improbable thoughts. The same is true of the health system, which forces you to regain health only by collecting the little pieces of blue light dropped by your enemies as you shoot them. Almost dead? The best tactic may be to charge straight into the worst of it. It all gives Control a welcome vitality, a forward momentum tinged with panic. It is not too stylish for desperation and carnage after all.
When it all comes together, Control's hallways and board rooms echo with wretched joy. There is something about the chaos of throwing big things about combined with the precision of the powers' targeting system that elevates the action. There is a special halo in nailing someone with a humidor through a distant railing, watching the bars go skewiff and the body crumble. Pillars shed their concrete under gunfire filling the environment with dust and grit. This game is the famous thick-air scene from the Matrix. It takes pains in depicting the way that things fall apart.
And in the crush of it all, Control has great fun with the impedimenta of office life. It is so energising to deck a machine-gunner with a well-placed white board, or use the spidery wheel-sprout of an office chair as a spinning glaive. Form follows function, too: the retro technology that the Oldest House runs on is perfect for style and atmosphere and also perfect to simply chuck around. The look of Control - a swipe-file mixture of what's cool in interior decorating at the moment, all of which suggests that Remedy's developers are probably doing up their own homes with Ercol and whatnot as they work - plays on the carefully disorienting time-warp detailing of movies like It Follows, where people have mobile phones in their pockets but use rotary phones back at the house, and it also makes the most of the fact that the good old era of heavy tech meant that there was an awful lot of stuff to hurt people with. Nobody's wounded by a flatscreen PC monitor, but something with a bit of Bakelite to it is going to do damage that everyone's going to remember.
Everything is an opportunity, in other words. It gets to you. Towards the end of the game, I chased one straggler halfway across a map just so that I could hit them with an armchair I particularly liked. Minutes later I survived an encounter simply because the physics are so bright eyed and malicious that you can nail people with an object as you pull it towards you in the first place: you can kill with concrete even before you've taken proper aim. There is something of Skate 3 to Control at these moments.
And when it all gets quiet again, you're left with a strange realisation. There's a little trickery in the narrative some of the time, but Control refuses to descend into all-out mechanical weirdness for the most part. It never forgets the pleasure of being a shooter above all other things, and with a few exceptions it's more eager to hit you with full-on with architectural beauty than warp your brain with the kind of spatial shenanigans you get in something like Portal.
In other words, while it invokes the dark things that lie beneath, Control's actually a peerless argument for the beauty of the surface. It revels in the peculiarly warm gloss of polished concrete, the simple and undeniable thrill of combat backed up with enthusiastic physics and animation, and the visual buzz of UI that has a stark, minimalist beauty to it. Without any shade of a slight, I would call Control a sort of coffee-table book in terms of its sheer visual flair - but for how dazzling it looks in motion as you wrench individual blocks from a stacked trolley, sending them thudding through the air, as you fling rockets back at the people who fired them at you, amber sparks glinting as they pass in and out of focus and then die away for good.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/08/26/control-review/
Wot I Think: Control
Control wasn’t what I was expecting. The developers of this third-person psy-shooter have been nattering about “weird fiction” and belabouring the game’s literary inspirations. After telekinetically yeeting myself through it, however, I’ve found little insightful storytelling, just a trad conspiracy/mystery story, and lots of colourful excuses as to how someone can suddenly develop superpowers. But when it feels this satisfying to lift an office chair with your brain and hoof it at a row of monster guards, I don’t care that it’s within the videogame equivalent of Warehouse 13. Control is also surprisingly funny. Those looking for a Lynchian labyrinth of hidden meaning might find it here if they squint, but what I found was a solid comedy pastiche of the X-Files, right down to a mysterious smoking man. I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.
You are Jesse Faden, a woman who has seemingly walked off the New York City streets, and into a brutalist government building that no other city-dweller can see, despite it towering over the skyline. It’s the Federal Bureau of Control, and it is in the midst of a lockdown. A disastrous entity (which you name “the Hiss”) has appeared and is infecting the staff, turning them into shooty monsters with heads that explode into blurry mist when you bullet them up.
You achieve this with a special gun. Alice L has already gone through a lot of the detailsabout this Rubik’s Cube of a firearm. Basically, though, it’s a gun with many modes. It changes shape at your behest from pistol to shotgun to grenade launcher to snipey rail gun to rat-tat-tat-tat machine gun. There are upgrades, made with materials you find in boxes, or which are dropped by enemies. You find attachments for the gun the same way. Some make the machine gun fire faster, others control the spread of the shotty’s pellets, and so on.
What about when the gun runs out of bullets? Well, that’s when you start using your superpowers. You discover your inner telepath quite early, and pick up new abilities as you explore the shifting corridors of the Bureau’s building. Soon, fights take on a pattern of shooting at the Hissy boys until your gun runs out of ammo, then flinging bits of concrete at your foes while it reloads. Later, you’ll be doing quick, blinky dodges, or lifting rubble up to use as a shield, or simply hovering in mid-air and brainwashing the nearest Hisspot so he fights for you.
This rhythm of pop-pop-fling-fling feels good for most of the game, but it also rarely changes. There is a playfulness to the fighting when each new ability shows up, but I found myself tiring of the same repeated, 60-second formula by the end of it all. The game makes efforts to mix up this formula by adding more baddies – shieldy shootmen, flying flingers, explodey wobblecorpses – or setting fights in rooms with gaping insta-death pits, but it rarely felt like an adequate change of pace.
Indeed, fights in tighter quarters often feel cramped, and chuckable objects or small bits of geometry sometimes get in your way as you strafe about, leading to a sort of mid-fight stickiness. That’s an infrequent problem, but one that contributes to the increasingly frustrating nature of gun battles as the game goes on.
Control’s sense of repetitiveness is down to a few small features. To refill your health bar, for example, you have to hoover up blue droplets that fall from enemies, which makes the instinct of falling back when you’re hurt counter-productive. You need to kill lots of Hissants, then whoosh out into the open and slurp up the health as you fight. A lot of last-ditch zooms to get health end in death and an annoying jaunt back through the level, because when you die, you respawn back at the last control point (checkpoints you can also fast travel between). This makes repeated deaths an exercise in navigating the most recently traversed couple of corridors over and over, and sometimes repeating skirmishes you’ve already won.
I mention these problems up-front, but know that most of the battles are enjoyable fling-fests. Control is a very serviceable shooter. It feels good in the fingerbits, you know? And there are a lot of wobbly visual effects that make your powers feel like smooth Hollywood super-nonsense. Lift a bench off the ground, and the paper and debris around it will float beside you too. Psychically punch a toilet cubicle and it will shatter into pleasing splinters, the cistern crumbling beneath your mental rage. One psy-brawl takes place in a model town where all the waist-high houses are made of plywood. As the last Hisshead dies and the fight music fades away, the whole place is left as a mess of sawdust and smashed miniature bungalows.
The game’s dud moments come infrequently, but they do come. Some optional quests end in annoying puzzle bosses, including one temper tantrum of a boss who creates instant death pitfalls in the ground, in a fight where you spend most of the time aiming upwards at a big weak point, unable to glance at what’s beneath your feet. I stopped bothering with side quests after another bothersome paranormal boss involving floaty platforming and a bunch of exploding floaty-bads. I think I just don’t rate the slow-moving levitate ability that highly.
There are some other small irritations. The lighting does that mega-darken thing when you step into a shadowy area, mimicking the shitness of human vision and making it momentarily hard to see. That’s a modern visual effect I’d be happy to telepathically hurl off a concrete skyscraper. And like I say, the fighting gets a bit frustrating. One scene has you traipsing around a constantly shifting hotel, fighting to rock music. But the tight quarters and lack of cover in a lot of these rooms demands quicker reflexes than most of the rest of the game. Your thumbs and brain might be quicker than old lumberfuck here [points to own face, slowly] so your fight mileage may vary. But to me it felt like an unwelcome spike in difficulty, like the optional boss fights of before.
Of course, I’ve spoken a lot about the shooty-bangs and flingy-florps, but very little about the chat-o-tale. That’s partly a desire to keep spoilers from you, but also because the story, once you scratch away the “weird” stuff, is actually fairly rote. Scientists scienced too hard, experiments have gone wrong, the government is covering stuff up. Standard. But as mentioned above, I was pleasantly surprised at how much humour is buried in the game, mostly in the paraphernalia you pick up along the way. There are funny notes with big redacted patches of text, and research videos featuring the Bureau’s head scientist, Dr Darling, surrounded by old knobular machines and big 60s computer banks. These are often worth a chuckle, and have the same corporation-comedy tone as the doctors from oddball Netflix show Maniac.
There is also a darkly comic and unnerving in-game TV show called The Threshold Kids, featuring two puppets with a more eerie presence than Bosco himself. I loved stumbling across these two creepiquins on the office’s TV sets, and their first video left me nervously air-laughing like a gasping hyena.
And there’s more! It’s funny when your new research assistant Emily starts talking with glee about knives made of interdimensional rock (“Think of the combat applications! Stabbing! Slicing! Gouging!”) It’s funny to read back-and-forth memos between two Bureau agents complaining about the weird-ass assignments they have to do, like cataloguing a dead dog for records, or inspecting the contents of a thousand tiny boxes (there is a human tooth in every box). Throughout the story, Jesse has a direct line of communication to an otherworldly pyramid of untold intradimensional knowledge, a being of infinite geometry and mystery and intelligence. It tells you how to craft guns.
This sense of humour saves the game from being a shrugging, dry successor to Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. It’s another reminder that self-awareness is often necessary if you are making something inherently ridiculous. The serious side of Control’s tale is mostly told through inner monologue, collectible FMV videos, and dream-flavoured cutscenes. The problem with using dream logic and vague sequences of flashing faces, however, is that just like a dream, it soon becomes unrooted and meaningless. You’ll probably forget Control’s story by the time you brush your teeth the next day. But you’ll remember the Threshold Kids and Dr Darling.
Overall, I had a good time, especially when introducing the Hissyfit boys to giant desks at speed. But by the time I reached the end, through the game’s twists and somersaults, I was also sort of glad it was finished. I’ll not be cleaning up the sidequests or indulging in extra Hiss-mopping tasks, because it feels like I’ve seen basically all there is to see in this concrete office. Or at least, enough to get the idea.
What I will praise highly is how Control indulges its own ludicrous nature every step of the way. I can’t overstate the fact that it’s a funny game – funny enough that the humour keeps you going from fight to fight, searching not for the source of your mysterious enemy, or for the answer to all the sub-mysteries surrounding Jesse, but for the next episode of the Threshold Kids.
https://www.pcgamer.com/control-review/
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