A true classic of a spectacle fighter, this game has it all, tight controls, variety, over-the-top acting that still manages to keep you hooked on the story, great bosses and a stellar soundtrack.
It can manage to drag on near the end, especially with how much content it recycles, and how tight some bosses weaknesses can be, especially with some weapons being vastly weaker than their counterparts, but it's not major enough to pull away from the experience.
Camera is even more of a problem than it was in the first game, doesn't pan out far enough to see most enemies you're fighting in even some decently small rooms and the adjustable camera is rare enough for the camera changes to be majorly seen as a negative, and it can make it irritating to point towards or away from enemies to do certain attacks, especially on ones who move around you frequently.
Over-all, a must play for anyone into anything that can be considered a part of the genre, like Bayonetta or MGR:R.

While the development efforts for this and the balance mods hosted on it are commendable, they're usually fun for about 30 minutes, and then you have to watch as they each go through the same "Who knew!" motions every time a balance decision like having any weapon without damage fall-off blows up in their face, especially when it's on a class like Engineer, Yes, I'm sure it SOUNDS cool, but it plays like dogshit, and I'm tired of every other weapon halving TTK while also getting me sniped from across the map.

By a heavy.

What an unfortunately placed entry in the series, by itself it's not that bad, but compared to the game that came before it, it's lacking in several areas, Nero's playstyle is just not as interesting as Dante's, Dante's arsenal is at its worst in this entry, with really dull weapons that feel awkward to use and the fun ones being ones that have just returned from past games.

The level design is just mediocre being awkward and confusing at times, with very dull and uninteresting puzzles littered with enemies that range from useless cannon fodder to frustrating timewaster enemies that test your patience.

Boss design is just okay, but they're all really easy or have some awkward annoying mechanics, but they really wear out their welcome with the next problem.

This game has a massive lack of content, the moment you get to Dante you're just playing through the same levels all over again but in reverse order and slightly remixed, the boss battles and enemies now feel really clunky to deal with as they're all designed around Nero's grab ability, but are possible to get by with just how much power and variety Dante has, afterwards you get to the final 2 levels as Nero and you're face to face with... A recycled mechanic involving RNG leading to a re-fight of every boss in the game, and an underwhelming final boss that's also recycled, with 1 new extremely punishing attack.

Over-all the game is fun purely for continuing the loop that was set up with 3, and the new ideas are commendable, but there's a lot of problems that make this a bit of a weak entry.

This game is pretty good, but it's INCREDIBLY short, easily beatable in 2 hours, any extra time being devoted to seeing as many dialogue options as you can, as there are a LOT.

It seems like they've just stretched themselves thin trying to perfect everything, but it ends up leaving an incredibly short experience without much of note, it's pretty much just a prologue.

Gameplay is fine though, it combines aspects of the webcomic with Point n' Clicks very well, and there's an incredible amount of attention put into everything, with tons of different dialogue options, and plenty of achievements tied to them.

Easily one of the best pieces of Half-Life media, managing to not step on the toes of canon, not go too far into its own stories, not shift the tone too hard, and doubles down on all the things that made the peak moments of the series.

Weapons are pretty similar to the set-up in HL2, mostly reanimated and rebalanced, my only major criticism is that a lot of the roster is wasted on 3 AR/SMGs that play very similarly, and are all insanely strong, typically 1-tapping most common enemies to the head, but I never found that I was too often filled with ammo, as the more survival horror ammo economies mean you're always going to be rotating through your loadout, the kick is also a great addition that plays really well with the physics sandbox, and in over-all execution I prefer it over the Gravity Gun, the Xen Grenade was also a really creative idea, although I found its more common uses lacking and enjoyed it more when used with puzzles, or in the final boss fight to spawn in a bunch of enemies to help you take him down.

The levels are over-all really great, but it starts off with quite possibly the worst by far, just running around Nova Prospekt as you dump grenades in holes, but from there it's incredibly fun, especially the levels that take inspiration from the route Episode 2 and Epistle 3 were heading for, by incorporating Aperture Science test chambers that feel like they could be straight out of a Portal mod.

Enemy design was a bit lacking, but HL2 and mods for it don't really rely on it for the enemy design, and are more of scene setters, but I did find the temporal crabs interesting, and the large zombies (presumably inspired by Jeff in Half-Life: Alyx, especially in their first appearance where you have to not be spotted by not making too much noise) were a lot of fun in most scenes they were in.

It even manages to pull off some fun boss fights, something the original Entropy: Zero struggled incredibly with.

Another thing it does better than the original is have an actual enjoyable story and characters, rather than an edgy punisher wannabe protagonist gunning down rebels as the only thing he adds to the story being insults to said rebels, only to have his teeth kicked in when a canon HL2 character shows up, Walker and his clone have an interesting dynamic in practice being a method of development for Walker's character, the protagonist being an emotional development, and his AWOL counterpart, being awareness of the reality of his situation with the Combine after the events of the first game, and the futility of trying to appease them.

Not sure why they had to make every other piece of dialogue a meme though, it really hurt the dialogue.

Over-all, this is a must-play for any Half-Life fan, and probably my second favorite Half-Life piece of media, coming right behind Half-Life: Alyx.

Hi-Fi Rush is exactly the type of game we need back in the industry, these lower budget games, with lower prices, that don't drag out for 50 hours but instead do 1 thing really well and wrap it all up by the end, but give you some replayability as an extra goal.

The gameplay is pretty damn solid, a spectacle fighter mixed with rhythm game mechanics, though even on the hard difficulty the game managed to be pretty easy, with most of my deaths being 1 per boss-fight.
The parry while on paper is a pretty fun addition, it kind of takes the same identity as the dodge, except it's far stronger, building up a LOT of stun for just following the basic rhythm, with the only downside being that the timing is slightly harder, just ended up making the game a bit of a cakewalk afterwards.
Sometimes the special attacks from the enemies where you have to dodge or parry were a bit irritating though, just due to the fact that they have different timings for how fast they start attacking you, and the guitar hero esque scrolling track was a bit hard to do when the Mouse 1 and Mouse 2 inputs look near identical at high speeds.
The boss fights were a bit tricky up until the parry, where afterwards they became a bit of a cakewalk, if you die once, now you've learned the parry pattern and can easily parry their entire attack pattern, stun them a bit and have a large window to do a lot of damage.
The alternate super abilities were just never enticing enough to outshine the basic one, simply because having access to something that does a lot of damage that you can cancel the end of your combos out of is VERY useful.

The story was... decent, it's nothing stellar but it's just a cute little story that doesn't wear out it's welcome and is very corny and campy, fits the tone very well and the voice acting was very on-point.

The art is just simply gorgeous, I didn't think it was possible to make stylized 3D work so well, and the cutscenes are animated beautifully, and the transitions to 2D are flawless, master class work.

Music was alright, the original tracks are admittedly very forgettable but including licensed tracks helped a lot to make fights stick, if they ever make a sequel, they need to double down on the licensed music.

The biggest snag I had in the game was just at the very final phase of the very final boss where it'll throw a thousand different sound cues at you at a time, and it starts to become difficult to catch up, but that's about the worst I can say for the game, and that irritation is quickly forgotten with how well the game wraps up.

The game is a solid recommendation for anyone who is a fan of any third person action game, a huge recommendation for any fan of rhythm games, and a gigantic recommendation for any fans of the DMC series, truly one of a kind.

Control is a very wonderful, very well written game, any fan of Alan Wake would probably love this game's writing and all the setpieces and scenes Remedy sets up brilliantly.

I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.

I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.

To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.

The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.

As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.

The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.

But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.

The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....

The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.

Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.

There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.

Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.

The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.

Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.

Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)

Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.

They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.

Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.

The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.

I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.

Played this game for about 2 hours and couldn't stand a second past the opening 30 minutes, this game is trying so hard to be a love letter to old Immersive Sims but it's just so fucking boring and frustrating to play, It feels like trying to remember a mother's garden by burning a scented candle that smells mildly of roses, it's cheap bullshit and I'd rather be doing the real thing.

To start off with the only other thing I can make note of, the visuals, the game looks pretty, it's a nice unique almost retro future space station in an alternate history world where Kennedy lived until like age 120 and technology (and in particular, the space race) was heavily developed.
Unfortunately the game makes sure to ditch it far too often in my 2 hours time played, too many areas that are just beat up shithole labs, or ugly vents, etc. etc. or just throwing you out into space, and at that point I feel like I'm just going through the motions in a generic setting.

Graphics are just not great, for a 2017 game the graphics are just oddly weak and look hazy and low quality, this is the quality of like a 2014 game, and it forces motion blur on you, any effort that gets put into the actual good looking areas is lost because it feels like I'm playing an upscaled Xbox 360 game.

Onto my biggest problem, the gameplay.
To start, we've got a BAD PC port on our hands, it runs fine, but it's all the nasty disgusting issues past that that really ruin this!
To start, we've got a lowered cross hair, wow, love those! and because of it all the weapon viewmodels look a bit awkward. no option to change it to a centered crosshair.

UI does not function properly on keyboard and mouse, you can't move tiles from storage unit to storage unit/inventory without just using WASD/arrow keys, and it's just such a crazy oversight, I thought Immersive sims lived and died on their PC versions? Why is this just an afterthought?

Weapons feel like shit, I had the wrench, the GLOO gun, the pistol, a few grenade types, and what I had hoped was a crossbow, but what was in reality a fucking nerf gun.

The wrench is fine, it feels a bit clunky as it's a first person melee with not a lot of weight, but what can you do, you need SOMETHING and it does the job, burns stamina a bit fast which gets annoying though.

Pistol just straight up fucking sucks, every enemy you're dealing with that's worth shooting at just soaks up every bullet so you're dumping like 2 clips per enemy, I was playing on normal difficulty, and it was getting frustrating as all hell, did the game expect me to drop everything I was doing and just start mass producing ammo boxes in the recycler? I made like 4 and I thought it'd do for now, but I was out within an hour.

Gloo gun is a neat idea, but using it in combat is so clunky and unfun that I tried not to use it, until the shitty psychoscope gave me little pokemon stat insights telling me that it's pretty much the best way to win combat scenarios, oh fucking joy, the least fun gun to shoot with is my ol' reliable.
Using it for putting out hazards is just dull, it just feels like a pointless chore just to remind you "LOOK AT HOW COOL THIS GUN IS!!"
Using it for platforming was neat though.

Crossbow is used for stealth, but for a note on the stealth in particular, you're given very little actual use for it early on, every area you go through is either too open and big to bother with taking it slow unless you want the best years of your life to rot away walking slowly from generic enemies, and the rest are narrow hallways/staircases where it's impossible to avoid detection, Thankfully you now have a nerf gun that'll distract them for 2 seconds, yay!

Grenades feel awkward and shitty to throw, should have added a landing location indicator.

Enemy types are just dull, in the first 2 hours they introduce the Mimics and the Phantoms.

The mimics are a neat idea, these little headcrabs that turn into props to get the jump at you, except...
They just don't do this, they run around directly Infront of you, giving a healthbar pop-up so you know it's there, and disguise right Infront of you, basically inviting you to get the free first hit on them, all the while the game does an annoying fucking jumpscare sound every time one poofs out of being a shitty prop, wow, so fucking scary, the mug turned into a headcrab, wow.

Phantoms are just annoying, they're tanky, they deal a shit ton of damage basically whenever they feel like it and dash RIGHT IN YOUR FACE constantly, wow, so fun! I was probably supposed to just douse them in the GLOO gun, but it was getting really boring so by the time I figured that, I was clocked out and didn't want to play the game anymore.

With all those heavy hitters, I quickly found that managing health was a total chore, you might as well spec into the medkit bonus very VERY early on as if you fight enemies at all you'll burn through them constantly, mostly just because a phantom tags you for 40 damage because you existed for a bit too long, or you walk into an electrical box hazard for .2 seconds dealing 70 health, I was at best an hour into the game when this started happening, glad I'm just thrown to the wolves even while the game is putting me through the most boring tutorial sequence imaginable.

Speaking of that, the tutorial sequence that I was going through fucking sucks, they're just throwing things at you and expecting to figure it all out, just dropping you like 15 upgrades, all your weapons and I don't even think they explain the recycler until you're at a point where you've probably used it like 3 times.
The story pacing in the sequence sucked too, you're given a hook to keep the mystery going, only for your biggest questions to be answered within the next 40 minutes, and they don't follow them up with any more, just follow through on more boring quests through boring areas with boring enemies.
Quest design was pretty annoying too, just a lot of moments where you're dragged on because they tell you to go to area A, but you can't go to area A without watching a video in area C, but you can't go to area C without the keycard from area F, and so on and so on.

And then there's the part where I stopped, when you get the psychoscope, it throws this piece of shit on you, the pop-up that I can only hope told me how to take it off disappeared within 1s and now I was stuck in a fight not knowing how to get 60% of my screen's visibility back, then I died setting me back a 25s load screen and the last 5 minutes of progress, through a room where I have to fight 2 phantoms, with a pistol and some explosive tanks, great, just fucking fantastic.

Outside of that, the propulsion controls for flying through space worked well enough I guess, I would have preferred something more like old school/HL2 esque swimming controls instead, but it's smooth enough.

Anyways, I can't see myself returning to this game anytime soon, as all I'm seeing here is a mediocre game made by a studio who makes as many bad games as they do good, with the only tagline I can imagine they're putting in the trailers being "By the people who played System Shock"

Second time I've been burned on a Arkane game, first Deathloop now this.