Western search action with an X-Files plot tied intimately with Alan Wake and the rest of the Remedyverse. It's obviously a banger, gorgeous, with many genuinely heartfelt moments as well as fun speculative worldbuilding. Anyone who grew up loving "monster of the week" shows like me would undoubtedly adore this game.

The core combat loop doesn't really gel until you get Throw, but once you do it's so fun. Played correctly, you're practically invincible, thanks to how good all of your weapons and utility powers are. Floating around the battlefield like some vengeful god, smiting corrupted soldiers with a flick of your finger. It's intoxicating and I think a much better expression of the combat loop of Quantum Break, which I liked but didn't love.

My biggest complaint? Ends sort of abruptly - almost like a TV cliffhanger - even with the DLC, some odd difficulty spikes, and a mod / challenge system that seems completely out of place. Seriously, why are there repeatable challenges to grind for weapon mods? I would've greatly preferred scattering concrete secrets around, like missile tanks in Metroid. Feels so out of place here.

Platted on PC and near-platted on PS4 so it's unlikely I will ever return to Control. I enjoyed my time here though and I hope the next game in this series leans into the exploratory strengths and discards some of the cruft.

Memorization-heavy peekaboo shooting is fun when the level design lends itself to that playstyle; otherwise it's a slog. When people talk about Blood, they talk about the cultists but never about the other enemies. There's a reason for that: they might as well not exist at all since strafing and/or crouching completely nullifies their (extremely slow and telegraphed) attacks. When the only credible threat in your roster is an overtuned one then you rely on the level design to do all the heavy lifting to try and shake things up in the long run.
For episode 1 and most of episode 2, it works. Mainly because the levels are very well-designed, pretty short as well as self-contained and thankfully the weapons in your arsenal encourage that kind of peekaboo shooting playstyle I mentioned earlier, Episode 3 onward is where things start to crumble. What once was the source of exhilaration becomes the source of frustration and eventually boredom. The levels become bigger so the crazy hitscanners more annoying to deal with, the other walking non-threats become tankier and come in greater numbers making them a slog to dispatch (Cheogh and Shial take the whole damn cake). Some levels are entirely devoid of cultists, those only serve to exacerbate Blood's main flaw as they are very much "nothing" levels as they lack any kind of challenge.

It's a shame because I love everything else about Blood but, due to an obvious lack of playtesting, the enemy balancing is so bad it ends up souring the whole dish. I played on Well Done because anything lower than that and the cultists become non-threatening too so not much point to it in my opinion.