I’m just stunned at how well this reviewed. Sure, Control has lots of style. But that’s all it has. The systems related to gameplay ranges from really bad to mediocre.
The fighting is obviously the weakest part. None of the guns feel good (no impact, inaccurate, incredibly small clips with long reloads, and mostly ineffective). And they’ve seemingly intentionally made weapon switching maximally awkward, just to make sure that nobody accidentally tries to use the right tool for the job.
Instead of the guns you’re clearly supposed to use the telekinesis ability to throw crap at enemies. It’s just absurd how much more damage it does than the guns, and how much easier it is to upgrade. But the problem is that the telekinesis is really boring to use. There’s no aiming, there’s no interesting timing, the rate of fire is really low, and the wind-up is frustratingly long. It’s basically just “is there an enemy on the screen? if there is, just press right bumper for about 1.5 seconds, release it, and the enemy will die”. Why is this the centerpiece of combat rather than a special purpose tool you use once every few encounters, just like the shield is.
The combination of the health system and the way incoming damage works make for a lot of really frustrating moments. It feels like most of the time you’re just taking no damage at all. And then you take 80% of your health bar in one go, and suddenly have a knife to the throat of needing to run into the middle of enemies to pick up the health shards.
The idea for the health system was probably to encourage aggressive play. No turtling around waiting for health regen; if you want healing you need to kill some enemies for it. But that doesn’t work when the health bar is almost always either at 100% or so low that you’re likely to die from a single hit. It’s never in between, and it’s that gray area in between where the “health from aggression” system should be interesting.
[The ultra-punitive checkpointing makes this even worse in the late game, since you’re either in a position where everything is perfect, or you’re about to lose 10-15 minutes of gameplay.]
Finally, the bulk of the enemies you fight are bad. They’re not distinct enough, it’s hard to tell at a glance what you’re actually fighting. And I found a lot of the attack animations to very non-visible.
The comparison to Remnant: From the Ashes is pretty stark. Both games tried to do the same kind of highly mobile and aggressive 3rd person combat with a small weapon selection. Remnant was janky as hell, but I ended up playing through it 2.5 times just because the combat felt so good. In Control, I was never happy to see a combat encounter.
That was longer than expected, I’ll split other gameplay topics than fighting to a separate message.