I got a little bit carried away with myself waiting for this game. I remember when it was revealed at E3, and my first thought was "finally something to fill the void after Prey (2017)." I wasn't too far off with that assessment. This game was honestly great. The combat was fun, the characters were interesting and charismatic (Especially Dr. Darling and Emily Pope), and ever-shifting nature of The Oldest House made exploration more interesting than a lot of open world games. Levitating and throwing stuff with telekinesis is just fun, man. And fun is what games are all about. Enemy designs got a little samey about halfway through, but I really loved when the fungus monsters showed up to mix it up a little.
Control loses major points, however, for not running on base PS4s. When even two enemies appeared on screen the game became a literal slide show. You can look up Youtube captures of the launch version, if you don't believe me. The Ashtray maze at the end was clocking a mighty average of 9 frames per second. This game did not run on PS4 at all for the first two weeks, and even after the patch it barely was able to maintain 20 fps during fights. Do not play this on PS4, you're better off looking at still images of it.
The story wasn't great, in my opinion. It was overly convoluted and tried so hard to be this weird, David Lynch-esque existential quandary that it overshot the mark and veered off into unintelligible. The other big negative is the insane and sporadic difficulty curves. Fair warning: this game has no difficulty settings, its one singular experience. So if you get stuck on some of the way overpowered bosses like Langston or the Anchor or Polaris, you need to hunt down some more skill points and just keep upgrading. Outside of those two points I don't have a lot of bad things to say about it. It isn't game of the year, but I'm not sorry I pre-ordered it. The AWE DLC is bananas and one of the best DLCs of 2020. If you have ray tracing enabled, get it.
Control loses major points, however, for not running on base PS4s. When even two enemies appeared on screen the game became a literal slide show. You can look up Youtube captures of the launch version, if you don't believe me. The Ashtray maze at the end was clocking a mighty average of 9 frames per second. This game did not run on PS4 at all for the first two weeks, and even after the patch it barely was able to maintain 20 fps during fights. Do not play this on PS4, you're better off looking at still images of it.
The story wasn't great, in my opinion. It was overly convoluted and tried so hard to be this weird, David Lynch-esque existential quandary that it overshot the mark and veered off into unintelligible. The other big negative is the insane and sporadic difficulty curves. Fair warning: this game has no difficulty settings, its one singular experience. So if you get stuck on some of the way overpowered bosses like Langston or the Anchor or Polaris, you need to hunt down some more skill points and just keep upgrading. Outside of those two points I don't have a lot of bad things to say about it. It isn't game of the year, but I'm not sorry I pre-ordered it. The AWE DLC is bananas and one of the best DLCs of 2020. If you have ray tracing enabled, get it.