I adored Control , but I didn’t think it needed a sequel, and actively argued against it . It’s one of the very few action-adventures that had limitless potential because of its Objects of Power, Altered World Events, and mad ideas. But then, well, Remedy abandoned ship after its Foundation and AWE DLCs .

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. After a solid 10 days of playing Control Resonant , it’s obvious why Remedy moved on. The series deserved a refocused follow-up to offer a new take on the Oldest House. It’s with mixed results, but once you pick it up, you may only put it down if (but probably when) you get a tension headache.

Control Resonant isn’t better than Control , but it’s not worse — they’re simultaneously too similar and distinct, in a way that only this universe can support. The same incredible world gets a different lens, with all-new twists and surprises along the way, but it might not click with you. Then again, if you didn’t like the original, it really could.

First things first: there’s a Control recap in the main menu — something all sequels should have. A couple of minutes later, you’re straight into the game. Seven years after the lockdown of the Oldest House, Jesse Faden abandons her comatose, once-WMD brother Dylan to fix Manhattan, which is now infected by the Hiss after it escaped the resolute walls of the Federal Bureau of Control.

Before she goes, Jesse unintentionally “wakes” Dylan by plunging a metallic post through his chest. As Dylan, you rip it from your sternum, and it becomes Aberrant, your own version of the Service Weapon. “Your turn, Fallback/Mistake,” says the god-like Board, with its voice like a haunted robotic Jabba the Hutt. It turns out they’re as scared of what’s going on as you.

You leave the Oldest House, and the first of Control Resonant ’s many beautiful moments plays out: a leaf floats around Manhattan, subtly revealing how bonkers the city’s become, corrupted by Hiss and Inception -like bent walls. Patterning, another new “complication,” has literally turned the world upside down and severed the island from the rest of society.

If you expect Control Resonant to be a major visual upgrade on Control , you might be disappointed. It doesn’t match up to Remedy’s Alan Wake II , either, though that’s no surprise, given its demands are completely different.

As usual, I opted for Quality mode first, just to check it out, but it was far too choppy on Xbox Series X. Performance mode is smooth, without losing too much detail, but any session longer than an hour may give you a real headache. I realized about 15 hours too late that removing motion blur and film grain drastically improved my experience.

Performance has its drawbacks. Metal effects are riddled with grainy noise, and enemy details are blurrier than you’d like. It’s a fair compromise, because you soon appreciate how its core combat mechanics demand speed, reactions, and precision, which its “top-tier” mode doesn’t really provide on consoles.

Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge

Control Resonant ’s most jarring shift from its predecessor is how the formula changes from ranged combat to a melee-focused, semi-open-world affair. A lot of my friends bounced off the first Control because they found it too difficult. I didn’t feel that way at all, but Control Resonant really pushed me to my limits, especially in the first few hours.

Its hack-and-slash style made me learn to love self-hatred and frustration, even if it took chunks out of me along the way. Its emphasis on timing and planning is everything. New enemies come thick and fast, improved hugely by the new-look Hiss, which are more deranged and cultish than ever: clearly the effects of a long lockdown in the FBC.

You only complete battles by taking out the Big Bads, because drones respawn. The radar, with its fat ol’ red spots showing the main threats, is a godsend to help you strategize. Initially, lesser enemies are good for regenerating health, as you chip away at the big dogs while figuring out their attack patterns. After a couple of hours, they’re morale-breaking.

In more open areas, and before you start unlocking base upgrades or those for your chosen path, close-quarters fighting can be brutal. The camera does its best to keep up, but given the huge focus placed on dodging, it’s a guessing game when it comes to incoming threats. Drones endlessly pelt you with projectiles, chipping away at your health from yards away. Trying to clear them to regain HP is regularly fruitless, as a Hiss heavy will laser, headbutt, slash, or laser (in a different way) you while you try.

After around five hours, you build a rhythm: dodge, attack, lift important enemy, dodge to get behind them, double jump, forever attack their soft back-fat for extra damage, hope they die, then dodge again to the next. If your screen turns red as you hang onto your very mortal soul, you sprint and try in vain to find health pickups or pick off a straggler. Just don’t stop dodging or sprinting.

Jesse felt graceful; Dylan dashes and smashes. Story-wise, it makes perfect sense: the headstrong Jesse’s combat was elegant, while Dylan’s is anxious, violent, physical, and a bit messy. Still, Jesse only had to deal with the weirdness of the FBC — Dylan was imprisoned and traumatized by it, so of course he needs to learn the hard and merciless way.

The downside is that the focus on hand-to-hand combat pushes Dylan’s telekinetic powers into the background. His limited specials bar means you can’t rely on them in the same way, and you’ll really miss the simple pleasure of picking up local furniture and launching it at the Hiss.

Aberrant at least gives you very different forms for each attack. The problem is that by the time you unlock another form, you’ve invested so much into your first choice that swapping feels a little pointless.

Personal upgrades help combat enormously. For the opening act, and arguably until the final sections, fights are a little paint-by-numbers. Combo finishers cleverly put Dylan’s strengths to different uses, and you have to be very experimental if you want to find the perfect loadout for you, especially as some abilities are way more OP than others.

Sean Durrie’s performance as Dylan Faden is a real treat, even if you can’t quite shake his resemblance to post-resurrection Jon Snow (or, with shorter hair, late 2000s Bam Margera). At first, his personality isn’t too believable — boldness and nervousness aren’t exactly bedfellows — but as Control Resonant plays out, you dig deeper and quickly appreciate the complexity of his character.

Dylan’s a scared victim with a delayed childhood, often responding like a boy rather than the man (and murderer) he became. Many around him, aside from Emily Pope and his handler Zoe De Vera, see him as a monster. Through dialogue options and superb writing, you understand his constant battle between his anxiety and the desire to prove himself.

Dylan might be a more physical fighter, but movement still has that familiar Control floatiness. There’s no falling damage, dodging takes priority over blocking, and within the first hour you’ve already got a double dash and double jump, with Elevate and Rush following soon after. It all arrives a little too quickly, especially when the game is simultaneously trying to teach you its new approach to combat.

One welcome change is the lack of asset management. There’s no endless cycle of swapping Shards in and out, or recycling what you don’t need, which removes one of Control ’s more annoying distractions.

The biggest upgrades come from Resonants: people transformed into some of the game’s best enemy designs, which act as bosses. The first, The Artist, took me a good 10 attempts to beat. It was mostly a skill issue, but defeating these gradually gives you more ways to fight back with new abilities on the triggers and shoulder buttons.

The Gap, Dylan’s mind palace, ties most of this together. You can jump into it outside of combat by holding down on the D-pad to upgrade talents, switch abilities, practice in the arena, and craft artifacts. It’s surprisingly easy to forget about it, but very important as the world scales around you.

Control Resonant ’s more open-world vibe is supported by a map, which you unlock in sections with antennas, and it’s broadly fine — much better than the horror show from Control . You unlock fast travel doors, which are fairly navigable, but it’s a shame you can’t freely select them from the map in reference to where you want to explore — you’re forced to pick them off a list.

Unlike the Oldest House’s more contained opening, Resonant gives you a surprising amount of Manhattan very quickly. You’ll still get caught out when you’re exploring, though. Remedy has gone all in on subtle visual cues, like a rope here, or a bit of tape there.

I still found myself completely stumped by a main story section that seemed completely locked, to the point I did all the hard yards in side quests until I hit a wall. It turned out a battery-powered elevator had been there all along. I would’ve been annoyed, but upgrading Dylan on my travels made the next section a doozy — the first time I felt like a badass after hours of barely scraping by.

While Control Resonant can be mainlined in approximately 15 hours, you’ll need the patience and nerve to go up against super-tough enemies that far outrank your own level. Exploration isn’t filler because practically everything feeds Dylan’s development: Jesse searches expand traversal (including the superb, wall-walking Shift, even if it’s occasionally a nightmare for the camera), Resonants open combat options, world feats provide upgrade points, and side stories mostly reward curiosity and the weirder, funnier elements of the universe.

The same goes for Control Resonant ’s “Secret Organization” challenges, which deliver some of its best puzzles. They’re heavily visual or logic-based, from interpreting art to figuring out binary-based washers, and while they can be properly challenging, they’re eminently solvable. There’s a real satisfaction in working them out without feeling like you’ve had to guess the answer.

The difficulty curve is also patchy. After The Artist battered me, later encounters became considerably easier, largely because I’d spent so much time on side missions and improving Dylan. Killing Resonants makes the wider world tougher, but the better resource drops go a little way to balancing things out.

Thankfully, Resonant hasn’t abandoned Remedy’s obsession with notes and collectibles, either, and there’s still plenty of humor buried away for anyone willing to stop and read everything.

It’s not all sweetness and red lights

Control Resonant wouldn’t be a Control game without a few problems, but mercifully, they don’t really affect your enjoyment — not after you break its back over the first five or ten hours.

As much as I hate to admit it — aside, perhaps, from the leaf sequence — Control Resonant is short of true blockbuster visual moments for the first few hours, even when you’re introduced to the first Resonant. The ideas are there, and it communicates them well, but Control always delivered these with gravitas. In retrospect, Control also had the element of surprise as it was a debut title, but the early stages of Resonant , in tandem with its more brutal combat, are a real grind.

It also mishandles its most iconic asset. Control ’s most defining feature is the moment when you discover a new section, and its name pops up in massive, bold, all-caps text ( BOMMMMM! ). When the first five or six of these popped up in Resonant , they lacked impact. I was behind wired glass for one of them, and staring at the floor during another. I’ll always take curation and forced perspectives if it delivers the intended jaw-drop, especially when the art style remains as strong as it does.

While Patterning creates some of Resonant ’s standout moments, particularly when Manhattan starts defying the basic rules of physics (which Pope reminds us to ignore), it still feels like Remedy doesn’t quite have the magic touch it had with OG Control .

Control Resonant has also lost, or at least sidelined, its goofier moments. Objects of Power feel less important and tucked away in side quests, or deployed as repeating challenges, e.g. chase the pram, sneak up on the camera, or find the dog toy. Derek Hagen’s much-appreciated return performance as Frederick Langston gives a few fun sections, and there are a couple of standout scenes — a dance party scene, no spoilers, is inspired — but the wider dark humor across Resonant just isn’t quite at the same level. It needed to be weaved more into the main story, rather than shuffled to side missions.

The most glaring issue for fans of Control Resonant will be its lack of a photo mode — the absolute cornerstone of the 2019 game, which creators still use to amazing effect. Remedy dropped this as a launch goal to get it over the line, which I understand, but it’s arguably the series’ greatest asset. Given how much of Control ’s appeal came from capturing its incredible art direction, launching without it feels like a real missed opportunity.

At its best, Control Resonant is one of the most beautiful and mind-bending experiences of the year. There are plenty of jaw-dropping moments and unforgettable scenes, and it’s yet another example of Remedy ram-raiding your mind to prove that once again, it’ll challenge long-established concepts in the pursuit of high art.

The original Control resonated with me more immediately, and I still prefer Jesse’s graceful combat, freedom, and sheer weirdness. But Resonant works because Remedy hasn’t just swapped one Faden for another and carried on regardless. Dylan is a very different person, and Control Resonant is very different because of him.

I still don’t quite think Control needed a sequel. Thankfully, Control Resonant doesn’t feel like one.