Control Ultimate Edition - Great game with one major flaw for me.

So i'm playing this game for the first time on Series X since i bought the physical UE in october(was still sealed until yesterday).

A few thoughts

- Great atmosphere

- Very cool style

- Great visuals and game runs great at 60FPS. 30FPS with RTX is fine but i don't like it. Feels choppy

- Gunplay is ok nothing special. The powerups are cool

Heres my biggest complaint though that would have elevated this game to atop tier status....the Map. Its absolutely abysmal. Not only is it static but theres no real layerss to it..or at least from the first 3 hours i've played. Hard to really see where you are as theres no floor indication. Game would have been incredible if it had a Metroid Prime style 3D map or even a better structured map with layers.

Anyhow. Who has played this? what are your thoughts?

And unfortunately this is the improved version.

I remember reading an interview (maybe in GameInformer?) about how they hadn't planned on including an in game map at all. They wanted people to learn the building and read the signs.

So that's kind of the only thing I can say: the signs really do help, especially if you can just get to the right Division of the building.

That being said, I'm playing through Jedi Fallen Order right now and I absolutely love their map and wish there was something similar for Control.

It doesn't even need a metroid prime or fallen order 3d map. Even one like RE would be fine enough. Each floor clearly shown and you appear on the level you're at.

I was fine with the map, since it made me rely on in-game signs and stuff. Made you more familiar with the world.

I was bummed about the standard mana bar. Quantum Break had the separate power cooldowns that got you to use the entire scope of your powers. Here, I just stuck to a couple things that worked.

The map in the non-ultimate edition was a pain, but not game-breaking for me. I just never stopped thinking that Control had incredible mythology wedded to a pretty dull game.

Since I already played it before, the map isn’t an issue. Having fun so far, it’s really neat to have this play at 60fps on a console and also play it on a bigger screen and sharper resolution than I did on PC. Really makes the visuals pop even more.

I also never played the DLC, so gonna fix that mistake this time around.

I didn't mind the map so much but the checkpointing in the original game was pretty rough in certain spots. Not sure if they did anything with that in the Ultimate edition.

I'd argue that the major flaw of this game is its combat encounter design. The look and feel of using powers is extremely cool, the enemies you use them on however are not fun to fight as many times as the game expects you to. We had a thread within the last year where people were asked what the worst type of difficulty boost is and I seem to recall 'bullet sponginess' winning by a landslide. Control has that in spades and it's made even more irritating that enemies scale in level the further you get into the game. All I know is that at the start of this game I felt fragile, and at the end of the game after getting all my powers and upgrades I still felt fragile, I just had more cool powers. For the record I like the game just fine but my goodness does it get overrated largely on the strength of its awesome aesthetics.