I didn’t go total God Mode, but I did tweak the Energy Recovery quite a bit so that I’m just constantly launching shit at enemies. I barely even use the Service Weapon.
On another note, the “rule of three” is one of my favorite little things in a game, ever.
finished the campaign just now. This was an excellent game all-around. And I really wanted to run through the Ashtray Maze again to show my wife how trippy it was, but alas, it only lets you go so far before teleporting you to the end.
Also, this isn’t a spoiler, but it IS awesome.
I jumped over that ledge and after many many deaths and jumping over that ledge again and again and again, I finally succeeded!
And my reward was a interminable series of cutscenes.
So this is new. They zoom in on the protagonists’ head and we can hear her thought process. Mind you, when she says “should I tell her my real name”, they don’t give the players a choice. But we hear her weighing her options and then SHE makes the decision, not us.
I don’t know why, but this feels sooooooo like a Remedy thing. It’s different from Max Payne and Quantum break and Alan Wake, and yet, also feels very similar.
Honestly, playing this game makes me even more curious to see how Rockstar games made Max Payne 3. Did they make a Rockstar game in the story telling style of Remedy? Or a Remedy game in the story-telling style of Rockstar Games? I really need to play that sometime from my backlog.
Today I learned that I’m completely out to lunch and that Bob Odenkirk did not appear in this game as the late Director Trench, although said director in the portraits looked just like the guy. I look at the Wikipedia entry for the game and there’s no mention of him, do a Google search for the question “Is Bob Odenkirk in Control?” with no result.
Intriguing casting. I’m not sure Odenkirk has the sense of, well, malice I’d expect from a Zachariah Trench, but I’d love to see him try the role.
Now do the rest of the characters in the game, Papageno!
-Tom
I’m saying he didn’t appear, though, although the guy who did play Trench (at least in the portraits and in the suicide scene) sure looked like him to me. I hadn’t played enough of the plot of the game to hear the character’s voice (I’ve since watched a YT video in which Trench’s voice is clearly not Odenkirk’s–supposedly it’s the guy who voiced Max Payne).
I found Max Payne 3 to be… terrible. Especially if you liked Max Payne.
The best way I would describe it is it has the Kojima Metal Gear treatment. Constant cutscenes clogging up the gameplay pipes with a bunch of names you couldn’t care less about. They always auto equip you with a sissy pistol afterwards for some reason. Also laser sights make aiming worse/impossible.
Max Payne 3 sucks and is a piece of shit.
Definitely not as memorable as the first two games, despite being prettier.
Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear, but I was saying I was intrigued by your casting. I know Odenkirk isn’t in Control. I’ve played it a few times over and I can probably list Odenkirk’s credits for the last ten years from memory. :)
So I was hoping you had more interesting casting choices for Control. If not, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with Bella Thorne for Jesse. And no one wants that, Papageno.
Remedy seems to have a stable of actors they like. The Dr. Darling actor might be familiar to you if you’ve played other Remedy games.
-Tom
Peter Stormare as Ahti.
“That’s why they sent me, I’m an expert.”
From what I’ve played, they could make a cool movie adaptation… The lore is strong in this one.
A little on the nose, but that Stormare fellow is definitely a crowd pleaser!
I’ll cast Thomasin McKenzie as Emily, the head of research who briefs Jesse at the main game save point. Except the twist is that for this role, McKenzie wears glasses.
-Tom
Helly R should be Jesse.
That’s a good call, Wholly! She’s great, isn’t she? I could totally see Britt Lower as the lead in a Control movie!
-Tom
We just binged Severance this week; that’s all I’ve seen her in but she was wonderful. And a few little touches in that show reminded me of Control too.
Yeah, the first few hours were amazing. The story telling and visuals and environmental design hooked me in. I had waited until I had a new rig to play this, and then elden ring got me first, and I spent about 110 hours in that game before swapping over to control, which I played for a whole 17 hours (and I’m sure i was paused for a chunk of that time.) This is my first real “next gen visuals” game where my 3080 was pushed to do all the fancy graphics and ray tracing, and god damn it was pretty to look at. In that way, I’m really glad I didn’t try to play this on my old rig and 1080 where I would have had to leave most of the bells and whistles off. Max ALL the things instead, and the game is just beautiful.
I loved so much of the story telling and level design, but there was so much combat. The gunplay and general fighting were pretty lacking - the guns didn’t feel effective or useful, so it was really all about hurling rocks. Almost all enemies / encounters were solved with the same strategy (and again, guns did so little that all those upgrades/mods didn’t matter) so the toolkit felt a bit lacking. Maybe if I turned the game up to some super-ultra high level I would have needed to use shield more, or really used powers other than launch.
I wish there was a little more variety to the game’s combat / interactions (this game never felt 1/10th as interesting as Moon Crash in terms of choices), but I guess Remedy is really all about the storytelling and atmosphere, and they nailed it there.
I’m glad I finally got around to playing this, and it was a fun experience. Is the DLC more combat focused or story driven? Maybe after a quick dive into something else I could circle back for a few more hours of story if it’s interesting.
The DLC does have story stuff, but it’s just like the base game in terms of having a lot of combat as well.
I recommend doing the Alan Wake cross-over DLC first even though it is the second DLC to be release. The Foundation DLC is kind of an ending to the game with an actual end game boss fight which the vanilla game lacked.
I hate to chime in as the “you’re not playing it right” guy, because he’s always annoying, especially when he shows up after you’ve played a game. But it seems to me the intent with Control is that guns and kinetic powers compliment each other, in that you’re using one while the other is on cooldown. They’re supposed to give the combat a kind of diastolic/systolic pacing, gunplay, then telekinesis, then gunplay, then telekinesis, then gunplay.
But I think what happens for a lot of players is they come to rely on one or the other, for whatever reason. Maybe they really like a certain gun, or maybe aiming a weapon with a controller isn’t their strong point, or maybe they dumped a ton of points into a certain power to the detriment of other powers. Whereas Remedy intended a dual pulsing to the combat, where you use guns or telekinesis while the other is on cooldown, I think a lot of players just assume they have to wait out the cooldown, which is how it works in so many other games.
I’m not saying this is why you didn’t like the combat, @espressojim, but I do feel that Remedy’s intent wasn’t always clear to some players, which can lead to feeling like the gunplay or telekinesis is underpowered. Of course, the difficulty slider throws a whole other wrench into the works: the game will play just fine with only guns or only telekinesis if you dial down the difficulty low enough. But I do think this is yet another design that the developers will let players ignore without knowing they’re ignoring it.
-Tom