Control - supernatural third person action-adventure from Remedy

[DalekFlay]

Is this game any good? Heard some stuff about it

- polished physics engine
- by creator of Max Payne games
- interesting story in the vein of X-Files and Inception
- satisfying combat
- good environmental storytelling via horror elements and immersive ambience
- that it's long

How much of it is true?

I'd say most of that is true, but how good the combat is seems to depend on who you ask. It's not bad IMO, just a little repetitive.

 

[orcinator]

Did you do any bosses, perchance?

I got pretty bored later in the game and just skipped most of the side missions except the fridge one, then I uninstalled after beating it. My mistake but I just didn't want to bother with something that could end up being yet another shootout with the zombies and the fridge boss was nothing to write home about.

For the destruction of the scenery alone, it is pretty cool,

It's very detailed but I wish it mattered more in gameplay since there don't seem to be any encounters where you can affect the fight by destroying the environment besides getting endless shit to throw. There was one part where you can break down a wall to get to an item container and I assume there's more but most of the time the walls around you (and the doors and chanlink fences) are indestructible.

 

[Urthor]

The combat is very good, the core loop of E E E shoot shoot shoot is very enjoyable.

This game makes Remedy's other games look like shit, and the writing is actually good. One of the best games nobody is talking about.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Still better than Risen 3 with no option to turn off the rather severe bloom that made your eyes bleed. Downloaded a random vatnik's fix to disable that post haste.

I have no idea how they thought that was acceptable. The game was basically unplayable due to it.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

character upgrade system

Wait, what? Clearly this is an RPG now.

Character upgrade systems have being a staple of the action genre at least since the NES.

rusty_shackleford have you ever played Mega Man or Metroid?
What would you call the gameplay system those games have in which the character gets more HP, ammunition and new abilities as he progress through the game?
Isn't it a kind of progression system for the Playable Character?

 

[Israfael]

My mistake but I just didn't want to bother with something that could end up being yet another shootout with the zombies and the fridge boss was nothing to write home about.

I probably spent more times on trying to kill the Anchor, Tommasi and doing fungus shit than all story missions combined, so you basically missed the game, I'd say. But I guess YMMV, some people like "mindless slashing" games like Shadow of Mordor, others can't stand it, and it's closer to that than to anything else.

 

[Israfael]

Here's a piece of gameplay. Can't say I was bored, I almost died once even with these fairly basic enemies (no screamers, flying shits and various fatboys with grenade launchers / telekinetic powers)

UPD: Youtube turned video to shit, despite the fact that it was recorded with a very high bitrate in h265, here's dropbox version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wk78t8956odoj8w/2019.09.01-23.03.mp4?dl=0

 

[Shackleton]

Yes, I'm flip-flopping on this one as I've got further in now and the combat has got more challenging. Not really any more varied, but there's more bad guys and some different variants which has made it more interesting. Died a few times on timed missions and I'm enjoying it again, a lot more than Rockstars Max Payne 3 that's for sure.

 

[DalekFlay]

I want this stereo system:

 

[GewuerzKahn]

This is one of the most gorgeous games I ever played. I love the setting and the style of the game really reminds me of the series Utopia.
With Pathologic 2 and Enderal it's a great year for me.

 

[Belegarsson]

I keep falling off the stage in the fridge monster fight

 

[what am i doing]

Just finished it. It was pretty good. Levels are varied and look really good, both in terms of art direction and straight up visual quality. Apart from characters' facial animations looking weird sometimes the game's visuals were generally top notch, while running extremely well. Setting is neat, it's like SCP but written coherently / by adults.

Gameplay is fairly basic but decent, although it mostly boiled down to throwing objects and using Pierce. Not that it was bad, just fairly simple and uniform. Telekinesis never really got old for me, though. I hate to say there was an absence of weapon variety because technically there was some, but the way the game worked there was just never much need to switch weapon types a lot, and the fact that you had to go into the menu to swap around between more than two meant, in my case at least, that I just set up two types (Grip and Pierce) and kept them for the majority of the game.

It did feel kind of light on side quests and "things to do" meaning for example you'd come across all these cool locales but they were generally setpieces that you can trash while fighting in but otherwise weren't very interactive. I enjoyed the stuff like the Mirror Lab, the roulette table, clearing out the Clog, etc - stuff that made for a break from fighting the Hiss constantly. It would have been nice to have more of those kinds of encounters. With the suggestions of DLC being on the way though I am guessing we'll get something of that nature added on.

I'm not sure how good it'll be for replayability, since a large part of its appeal is exploration and mystery; I'm probably going to let it sit for now and might give it a second go later.

Good game overall, one of those ones I'd generally buy after pirating - I may grab it when it comes out on Steam.

Edit:

Spoiler

Also, they genuinely had me with the false ending. I actually thought they were going with a grimdark ending where the Hiss win until the fake credits finished and gameplay resumed.

 

[Multidirectional]

I uninstalled after an hour. It bored me so much I figured there's no way it could improve enough later on to be worth it. Combat felt meh and the story seemed like garbage gibberish with every single character I encountered being boring as fuck, especially main one. I wish Remedy would've just kept making Max Payne sequels, we could be playing Max Payne 8 by now, damn it. Not a fucking thing they did since Max Payne 2 was even remotely as cool.

 

[orcinator]

Oh yeah, almost forgot, holding a button to pickup objects and interact with them.
It's not THAT much of a bother but it's just an offensive design choice since there's not a single instance where you might not want to pick something up and maybe two instances where you're liable to get interrupted.

 

[HoboForEternity]

didn't know poets actually did another song for remedy

 

[DalekFlay]

the game's visuals were generally top notch, while running extremely well.

Noticed a few people saying this, which is weird because it's getting a lot of press as a total resource hog. Even without ray tracing it's hard to run it at higher resolutions with high settings. Turning volumetrics and reflections down to medium gives you like 20fps though, which is crazy. Unfortunately medium reflections look super grainy. Ray tracing looks grainy too. I feel like Hitman 2 has way better reflections with much less resource cost. I dunno, I feel meh about the technical graphics. The design is super top notch though.

As for the game, I'm a good ways in (recently got levitate) and it's okay. I'm nowhere near as enamored with it as most reviews. I watched the Zero Punctuation on it and mostly agreed with what Yahtzee said, repetitive combat that isn't that unique, which they keep throwing at you with frequent respawns, and not a very well written story. The mood and ambiance is great though, which I'm guessing is what most reviewers focused on. Even the "Metroidvania" aspects are kind of dull because whenever I go back to previous areas with new powers all I find are grindy resources and cryptic notes. There's no excitement of finding a new missle pack or life meter extension really. I dunno... I'll finish it, but meh.

 

[Alienman]

Been playing it a little and man, from a story perspective I so wish they would have gone with a special forces SCP team/agent approach, instead of plunking you down smack down in their HQ with no real prior knowledge of anything. Would have been so much cooler. Now 2 hours in I mostly just feel confused, with no real attachment to anything even if the atmosphere is pretty good.

Something like this:

 

[Tehdagah]

I watched the Zero Punctuation on it and mostly agreed with what Yahtzee said

 

[Adon]

Finished it, and I liked it but it is not without its faults.

To be concise, the combat does get repetitive but I didn't start to feel tired of the gameplay up until close to the end. I realize this was the case because I've been knocking out the side missions as I went through the story and those missions are what kept me from getting bored. It became clear to me that Remedy ended up sticking the more interesting, more difficult combat scenarios to side missions as a way to let anybody just waltz through the main story with relative ease. None of it is insanely difficult, but the optional content has the scenarios that make the best use of every ability even if some of them are basically useless or extremely situational. I can understand their decision to go in that direction even if I disagree and wished that they had stuck some of those into the main questline. It's a shame that a lot of those missions aren't unlocked till later in the game and that levitation takes so long to get because it's easily the most fun to use in the harder combat scenarios where there's a bit of resource management as you have to be more careful in regards to your energy meter. Not in a huge way, but enough that I felt having to make conscious decisions as to my approach to certain bosses/enemies.

As for the story, I think the beginning is too try-hard in terms of "Hey, look at me, I'm WeIRd!!1!" and some of the dialogue tries to emulate that feel but everything else (especially a lot of the files) are interesting and well-written that I always stopped to read everything I picked up. I don't like the constant comparisons to David Lynch this game gets tho, because nothing in this games feels like something out of a Lynch film. None of it ever gets too abstract, and the game is too focused in explaining its own internal logic to the player to the point that everything makes sense in a video gamey sort of way (in a way that makes this fit better with Alan Wake and I think Remedy ended up having the same conclusion as evidenced by making Control take place in the same universe). But I appreciate the attempt at trying to evoke that surreal, dreamy feeling even if the game never actually pulls it off. The visuals are strong and great, but the game never becomes more than the sum of its parts to make it work. Same way that there's an oddness to the characters, but not the same kind of "off" feeling from Lynch movies. They're more oddballs (and great ones at that) than weird.

Overall, a vast improvement over Quantum Break. I probably put this game in between American Nightmare and Alan Wake.

 

[what am i doing]

Noticed a few people saying this, which is weird because it's getting a lot of press as a total resource hog. Even without ray tracing it's hard to run it at higher resolutions with high settings. Turning volumetrics and reflections down to medium gives you like 20fps though, which is crazy. Unfortunately medium reflections look super grainy. Ray tracing looks grainy too. I feel like Hitman 2 has way better reflections with much less resource cost. I dunno, I feel meh about the technical graphics. The design is super top notch though.

It may be that it makes better use of resources. My computer's an absolute beast so in theory it can handle basically any game, but there are a lot of games out there these days that run like shit despite having theoretically low system requirements, like many Unity games (Subnautica comes to mind first up). Or Paradox games that run like shit out of the box but can often make big gains in performance with a tiny bit of slav magic.

I think perhaps Control is just made more after the fashion that it takes a lot of resources to run but if you have those resources it runs really smooth.

 

[Israfael]

lot of resources to run but if you have those resources it runs really smooth

Both Northlight engine games are actually very well optimized, it's just more or less "honest" lightning, global illumination and the other, not so obvious stuff (that makes the picture look more like "serious" raytraced CGI rather than rasterized game) - LSAO, Remedy's own version of voxel GI, "physical" rendering and so on - requires lots of computational power to run at higher (not 50% upscaled, as on consoles) resolutions.

Also, it's more slanted towards compute-heavy GCN and Turing cards, which is why it is noticably slower on earlier GeForce boards. Also, game features heavy LODding (texture caching is so aggressive that you can see memory consumption jumping 3-4x times higher or lower depending on scene) and probably other bandwidth / compute saving mechanisms that might help use the hw more efficiently.

For whatever reasons, we forgot how games were actually released before circa 2008 - FEAR, Doom 3, Far Cry 1, Crysis 1 could not be ran at highest settings even with the top GPUs of that time and no one really complained.

 

[DalekFlay]

I agree it's well optimized outside of certain effects. My 2070 runs it at like 80fps at 1440p if I put volumetrics and reflections on medium (with ray tracing off of course). Those effects are just super demanding, which is why benchmark type videos which always default to highest settings are showing it to be a super demanding game. Unfortunately I think reflections look like ass on medium, so I'm keeping them on high and dealing with 50-60fps.

 

[Morgoth]

The game looks better when you just disable volumetric ligthing and reflections entirely. Also gives you easily a 20+ fps boost.

 

[DalekFlay]

The game looks better when you just disable volumetric ligthing and reflections entirely.

I really doubt it.

 

[Morgoth]

The game looks better when you just disable volumetric ligthing and reflections entirely.

I really doubt it.

You're getting used to it after a minute. But debating personal taste is useless.