Apart from the artistic design of its spaces and lighting, the game is an absolute powerhouse technically, particularly with its lighting and reflections (check out the reflection of the desk lamp on the whiteboard—chef's. freaking. kiss.) Ray tracing is utterly amazing and some of the graphics I've seen in this game are unmatched by any game I've ever played. Slick, oily gray hallways whose only sources of light are cream-colored desklamps pouring through plate glass; a sickly looking industrial maintenance room lit by wan, elegiac yellow-greens; or inky basalt corridors bleeding with the warm orange glows emanating from the larger room ahead. The stuff they do with lighting in this game is absurdly gorgeous, with a touch of the morbid and weird. I love it. In general, it looks incredible; but I did have to rely a lot on DLSS (Nvidia's cutting edge AI upscaling technology) to do some heavy lifting, and its implementation in this game is not perfect. There are certain instances where textures are mucked up by DLSS, which seems that it can't quite manage full resolution images in certain cases; namely with certain paintings on the wall, and some decals which appear regularly. You're going to want to play in DirectX 12, though, and enable DLSS despite these issues, because ray tracing makes this game look so incredible that it's worth the drawback. I ticked down shadow resolution to help with framerate, but left most other settings on Medium to High. I am playing on a I9-9900K @ 5.0ghz and an RTX 2080 Super at 1440p and saw between 60-80 frames per second with mixed Medium/High settings. Your mileage may vary.
If you're looking for a good third-person action shooter, you're going to love this. The game seems to balance its pace between exploration—in which you exist within this compelling, affecting atmosphere and learn more about the lore behind the game's events—and all-out gun battles with challenging enemies, including boss fights that should satisfy most players. There's a significant ramp-up in difficulty here from other shooters you may be used to, and that leads me into my biggest criticism of this game.
The checkpoints.
Oh, the checkpoints. Those buggers.
For some background: I hate checkpoints. I hate them universally and I hate them fiercely. I wish they didn't exist. I wish every developer allowed me the opportunity to save whenever I wanted, as many games do.
Checkpoints are always bad in my book. But! Sometimes checkpoints are not horribly, experience-destroyingly bad. Unfortunately with Control, this is not the case. Your checkpoints are limited to certain areas within the game, and the setting tends to be a bit convoluted and not so easy to navigate. While this imparts a genuine, lived-in feel for most of the game, it really becomes frustrating when you spend a lot of time hunting for goodies, checking all the nooks and crannies and not paying much attention to where you are... Only to get killed and have to respawn across the entire level to where that one point you saved at was, back 45 minutes ago.
These checkpoints are putridly awful because, not only do you have to traverse across territory you've already seen, but you've now got to fight additional peon enemies to get back to where you were. I'm all for challenging the player and punishing them when they make a mistake, but so much of my enjoyment of Control came from being fully immersed in its weird, creepy atmosphere, and helped along by its incredible visuals. Many times I found myself manually walking, fully in character, trying to figure out what the heck was going on here. When I died and was forced back to where I was half an hour ago, I was immediately pulled from the engrossing experience I was having and simply sprinted through these amazing environments, no longer caring about it and just wanting to get back where I was. It wasn't something like in From Software's Dark Souls, where each route was a challenge to be overcome by learning more and more—rather, in Control, it's a jarring interruption filled with disposable enemies, and dying, instead of being a learning experience, only served to make the gameplay a jagged, regular shift between being fully immersed and doing busywork walking from place to place. It seems the devs insisted on aping the bonfire system from Dark Souls without realizing what made that system so compelling and addictive.
This is a problem solved relatively easily. Checkpoints in Control are too few, too far between, and, in my opinion, it harms the experience as-is. A simple way to fix this would be to rely on a more precise, arbitrary checkpointing system rather than the rigid system in place. Remove the respawn functionality strictly tied to Control Points, and use them just as fast travel beacons and level-up hubs (which they already feature), and simply spawn the player at the beginning of the room before which they just died, and allow them to continue their progress sans tedium. But perhaps this would make the experience a bit too easy? Again, your mileage may vary! This may not bother you, but it substantially harmed a lot of the experience for me. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've used the Assist mode more than once to bypass these frustrating instances so I could get back to doing what I enjoyed most in this game: Wandering around, being weirded out, and being constantly made tense by this wonderfully crafted setting. I know, I know: I'm not a real gamer; I'm a disgusting loser and I should get good. Noted.
Despite some of my harsher criticisms, if you're looking for an action-packed technical specimen of a third-person shooter, a graphical work of atmospheric art, or a weird, creepy story penned by Sam Lake which will keep you guessing, you should pick this up. It's worth it—if your machine can handle it, and if you can handle its putrid checkpointing.
⭐⭐⭐
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