While the original Control was o ne of my favorite games of 2019 and has stuck with me since, I’m not quite all the way there with Control Resonant , despite having a good time overall. After 30+ hours in the open world brawler, Remedy has made a good go of the open world switch, though pinpricked with a number of issues that span the game. It’s enjoyable and addictive, but sometimes roadblocked by frustrating design choices.

In Control Resonant you play as Dylan, Jesse’s previously locked-away brother who now must use his paranormal superpowers to save the city from the demonic Hiss, but also a new, little-understood “Pattern” threat that is making parts of New York look like that one city-folding part of Inception .

Dylan has access to a number of weapons, skills and powers which expand over time. His movement is way too restricted in the beginning of the game, and it does not help that Control Resonant’s earliest levels are often not so open world at all, and they can be full of irritating dead ends as you try to get where you’re going. That opens up later, and there’s one traversal climbing skill in particular that makes things better, but it doesn’t arrive soon enough in the game. You’re going to need to make a beeline for it as soon as possible. There are some mind-bending zones utilizing a host of gravity switches so you’re say, suddenly walking on a road that was previously over your head. Extremely cool to look at, adding to the game’s top-notch art direction, but in gameplay, I found them more disorienting than anything that made things more fun.

You will collect skill points from doing main missions, side tasks and enemy clearing in each zone, which will level up the area to give you little bonuses and access to better shop items. This aspect is kind of neat, and it encourages you to bounce around to places you’d been before to raise those levels. I never felt lacking in skill points as I progressed. If you think you’re behind, go to a zone you haven’t spent much time in, kill some things, explore and do some side quests, which are incidentally some of the best quests in the game, and not to be missed.

Gear upgrading is not as cohesive, as Control Resonant has a ridiculous amount of materials that all essentially do the same thing, but are irritating to find between random zone chests and hyper-specific enemies which they might drop from. 30 hours later and I still have large chunks of trees I haven’t been able to fill out. The game also does not let you change unlocked skill powers unless you use a rare and costly reset currency for reasons I cannot understand, as it hampers build diversity in a way that other portions of the game don’t.

Combat itself is frenetic and fun, but gets repetitive once you get into a spam loop, which, in my case, was building up power until I did a fire blast move and a ground spike, which took care of almost everything. I found the slate of secondary weapons to be underwhelming, minus the big hammer that can slam aerial enemies into the ground, which never gets old.

While the open world combat can be fun, boss battles are not good. They are often overly tanky and devoid of much strategy. Practically every boss I faced had no more than two or three moves, and fights can be 10-15 minutes of tedium rather than strategy. The final bosses toward the end of the game are just plain exhausting, using an enemy type that is innately resistant to your main weapon, dragging out the fights even further as you must float in the air and get just a few tiny hits in before dodging damage for the next 15 seconds. Repeat 100 times and don’t screw up, because heals are few and far between. This aspect needs some work.

The story? I’ve always been interested in the universe of Control , and things like its fun little links to Alan Wake and such. Here, there is a lot of lore packed in, and you get to learn plenty about the deeply strange and discordant world, which is one of the more creative ones I’ve seen. That was true in the first game and continues here.

Unfortunately, I do not like Dylan. His writing, his voicework and especially his personality are grating. I do understand that given his confined, neglected history, he is stuck in arrested development to a certain extent, but the way that is rendered throughout the game is bad, as is his voice, which sounds like a minor complaint, but when you listen to it for 30 hours, yeesh. I wish Jesse had simply gotten more powers and we could have played as her again.

It’s an interesting idea to switch genres to expand the world of Control with a radically different genre. It works, most of the time, though there are aspects that could use more polish and rethinking given that this is Remedy’s first stab at a large-scale brawler. For what it lacks in fleshed-out systems, it makes up in universe building and art direction. I do recommend you play Control first, as some have asked, and I do think that’s a clearly better game, but I imagine Resonant will find an audience as well. As for me, there’s still plenty more to do and see and smash with comically large paranatural hammers.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .