Control Resonant review: Big, bold and beautifully weird

Two things have broken containment in Control Resonant. The series’ reality-warping Hiss has somehow escaped the Oldest House and begun wreaking havoc on the wider Manhattan area. Remedy Entertainment has followed suit, breaking free from the confines of the original game to deliver a bigger, bolder sequel that’s at its best when embracing that newfound freedom.

Despite the massively expanded playspace, nothing has been lost in translation. Resonant is a Remedy game through and through. It’s thematically weird, packed with meta-narrative, and effortlessly pulls you forward on the strengths of its semi-open-world alone.

It also represents the first time the developer has ever tried its hand at a melee-focused action-RPG, and while that inexperience occasionally shows, Resonant’s thrilling highs make its shortcomings feel like mere bugbears.

Control Resonant screenshots

What is Control Resonant about?

Dylan Faden has awoken from the comatose state he was left in after being seemingly cured of the Hiss’ mind-corrupting influence by his sister, Jesse, seven years earlier.

During his long sleep, the Hiss have escaped the Oldest House, Jesse has gone AWOL, and the Federal Bureau of Control’s still-human employees’ distrust of him has only grown due to all that nasty murder business he carried out on the same people that captured and experimented upon him.

As a result, Dylan’s unsurprisingly not a happy chappy, but he nonetheless opts to help the FBC in their last-ditch effort to save Manhattan from turning into a circus, believing the quest will lead him to his lost sibling.

Unfortunately for him, the city has already transformed into a physics-defying concrete jungle straight out of Inception. Fortunately for you, this makes exploring Resonant’s surreal world an absolute blast.

Manhattan of Madness

Resonant’s Manhattan is best thought of as an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Its sheer scale is immediately apparent, but exactly how its individual pieces fit together only becomes clear as the city gradually opens up.

There’s a similar uncertainty to FromSoftware’s leap from Dark Souls to Elden Ring. Taking something that thrived within tighter confines and blowing it out into a non-linear world raises an obvious question: what would Remedy fill all that space with to keep it engaging?

As it turns out, plenty. Control’s main story is interlinked with Dylan’s exploration of Manhattan itself. Progressing the major story beats requires seeking out strength, meaning almost everything Dylan does across Manhattan ultimately contributes to making him more capable.

Bite-sized world events, investigating Altered Items, or more substantial side missions all push you to explore Manhattan’s wondrous verticality. Activities are densely packed into a relatively small space, but rarely feel overwhelming and never mandatory.

Pick and choose whatever you like the sound of (I opted to get in a malevolent taxi and was whisked off to an alternate reality to solve puzzles) and be rewarded with cosmetics or upgrade materials for your efforts.

Eventually, you’ll happen upon the very best of what Resonant has to offer: Faults, and the titular Resonants. These give Dylan access to new traversal and combat abilities, respectively, but getting stronger is almost secondary to the bespoke gameplay they offer.

One of these had me taking a leap of faith into an underground parking lot in pursuit of Jesse, only to gain the ability to treat walls as floors and use it to climb back out after the entire structure had been warped into an Escher painting.

That one ability uncovered the almost maddening nature of Resonant’s four-dimensional space and just how intricately designed it is.

Finding these set pieces, however, can be a nightmare. Resonant doesn’t hold your hand. It gives you pointers on where you should be looking to progress the plot, but the map, while doing a great job of telling you what’s nearby, isn’t informative enough about how you get there.

It’s that same design contradiction that prevents Resonant’s combat from being as good as it could be.

Classifying combat

At its best, when everything gels together, Resonant’s combat sings. Remedy has provided ample choice for the player to build Dylan their own way with numerous weapons, branching skill trees, and abilities that can synergize to create fluid combo strings.

Enemies are varied enough to demand that you tailor your loadout to suit the situation, but therein lies the rub. You can respec your build in Resonant, but it’s not free, and once you run out of the items needed to do so, extras aren’t cheap.

At one point during the story, Resonant throws a curveball with a completely new enemy type. These, you’re told, are resistant to blunt damage. Returning to the hub area – essentially Dylan’s inner mind accessible anywhere outside of combat – to swap out a big bonk hammer for a bladed power weapon made dealing with these markedly easier.

That same loadout felt lacking against regular Hiss, though, forcing the use of another precious respec token. There’s so much choice in how to approach combat in Resonant, but at the same time, it feels artificially restrictive. Remedy allowing Dylan to swap weapons on the fly instead of locking him into a loadout would have eliminated that friction entirely.

Those frustrations, combined with spongy foes that outstayed their welcome even when Dylan’s power level matched theirs, eventually caused repetition to creep in.

Resonant offers enough outside of combat that it’s easy to go exploring whenever that fatigue starts to set in. There’s no such escape from Dylan, however, and he’s a weak vehicle for delivering the game’s otherwise intriguing overarching themes.

While you can make him more emotive through dialogue options with certain NPCs, this Faden sibling is a black hole of charisma. Every still-living human hates his guts, while his handler, Zoe, is one of the few people willing to show him compassion. Dylan attempts to bond with this friend, but the dialogue often feels like it’s trying to force an unearned friendship dynamic.

Verdict

Control Resonant is Remedy at its most ambitious, turning Manhattan into a reality-bending playground that’s every bit as fascinating to explore as it is maddening to navigate.

Combat doesn’t always afford that same sense of freedom, with restrictive loadouts and spongey enemies getting in the way of an otherwise satisfying action-RPG. Dylan also struggles to fill his sister’s shoes, but neither issue is enough to drown out the creativity surrounding him.

Resonant is bigger, bolder, and unmistakably Remedy. It may occasionally get in its own way, but when everything clicks into place, but its ambition is far more exciting than its frustrations are limiting.