OK, now I'm several hours in, essentially where Alex is at in the Quick Look it seems like (I've only just started watching as I take a break to write down some thoughts). Control is a cool game and it has a lot going for it...with some pretty substantial flaws that people who are still waiting for opinions on the game will probably want to know about.
Pros:
- When the momentum is at its height, the stylistic choices, cinematography and mysterious vibe can be intoxicating. Alex describes the item that provides your Launch power as a haunted floppy disc containing Russian nuclear launch codes and that's exactly what it is, but the rat-tat-tat journey you go on from The Board to The Hotline to collecting the floppy is pure sugar for absurdists and sci-fi mongers.
- The flair on this game is incredible, from its treatments when you first enter a new area to the lighting and effects that pop off of killed enemies. Rather than blood spray, an Annihilation like prismatic effect bursts from downed enemies and it never gets old. The whole vibe of The Board (and getting Max Payne's VO to perform the Hotline bits) is utterly, perfectly nonsense but endlessly cool.
- The physics are wild and grabbing things and launching them remains a highly underutilized video game mechanic. It's hard not to be in awe of what this game is going for at times, and that's on a baseline PS4; I'm sure the lighting, color palette, physics, everything hits a whole other level on proper PCs or even the revisions.
- The environment is wonderfully interactive; another reference to the Quick Look, where Alex shot the projector and the extinguisher. Those item effects do fire off all the time, even if they get hit with another object, which leads to a lot of fun, almost Just Cause-like chaos when you least expect it. Fun fact: you can also pick the projector up to launch it, and instead cast the video its playing all over the place.
- Awesome, awesome headphone experience. In some ways the sound design has been the best part of the game so far, or at least the most consistent.
Cons:
- While the physics are really cool, The Director doesn't move all that dissimilarly from Mass Effect: Andromeda's avatar, which will take some getting used to if you haven't experienced that odd blend of floaty and snappy. This means she gets caught on the environment a lot, and is both very mobile and weirdly hesitant almost simultaneously. I imagine for some people this game will straight up Feel Bad To Play.
- As the game opens up into what it really is, an exploration game with combat elements, the plot loses momentum and some of the more novel things about the game lose just a little bit of their charm. It's one thing when you're spiraling... out of control in an info dump alongside Faber, it's another when you get lost on side quests for two hours, randomly stumble into a new mission giver and have to struggle to remember what the whole lot of nothing the characters are talking about might could mean another few hours later.
- The map is bad. I've been getting New Colossus or DOOM 2016 levels of lost in these environments, but unlike those maps mostly getting convoluted when you started chasing collectibles and trophies, Control is just not clear how you get from one room to another in situations where the two appear right next to each other. They let you run around with the map up (it's actually the only way to view it) and it's a generous touch, unfortunately the map is just a real pain to read (and can't be zoomed at all).
- To that end, the brutalist architecture is definitely a v i b e but it also means you'll inevitably wind up running in circles more than you'd like if you stray from the main plot out of a completionist's impulse rather than a natural progression of your play. The game seems pretty good about finding reasons for the player to come across most of its content naturally, so it's a real shock whenever you spend twenty minutes looking for something specific and come away totally baffled.
All in all, Control feels like exactly the sort of game you'd expect at this point in the PS4 generation's life cycle. It has a couple massive gimmicks that it pulls off better than anyone to date has, it looks top of the line (character design and animation sometimes excluded) and it contains just about every marque feature of the past generation - and yet even there it's got surprises. You've got minor RPG elements like a skill tree, equipment mods, follow-up questions in cutscenes, bonfires, a return to somewhat harsh death mechanics. But it also doesn't have a cover system, or health that regenerates out of the red if you take a breather, or any way to indicate you're about to fire an explosive canister into the beam directly behind you rather than the enemy 20 yards away.
In other words, like Alex said at the start of the quick look, it's a B-ass B game. What it really has going for it, it has going for it to a tremendous degree, but the same is very nearly true for the things that hold it back. Like I said in a previous post, I'm fine with slow down, but for those who aren't, once you've got a couple powers and your enemies have a couple countermeasures you can routinely expect the framerate to dip into the low teens if not worse when the physics and effects really get popping off. To me it suits the mystical, fragmented vibe of the game, but if that nauseates you, know that this game both controls above average at best and performs below average at best most of the time. If you can get past that, Control seems like a pretty good bet for at least one of 2019's most notable games, if not the classic it hints at on paper. If you can't? Well, that's most of the game part of the game on PS4 (and I imagine XBO), moderately finnicky controls and superlatively finnicky performance.
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