When the Remedy Marketing and Communications team was at GDC last week, they were able to give a handful of media an extensive demo of Control. According to Remedy’s Head of Comunications, Thomas Puha, Remedy provided the press with an honest look at the game. This means the team focused heavily on showing off gameplay and/or interesting concepts, even if the game could still use some polish in these areas. The team always implied Control is a gameplay-driven experience and so they wanted the press to experience and believe that Luckily, the previews so far seem to reflect this. All major videogame outlets are praising Control, stating it’s shaping up to be one of the most interesting action titles to release this year.
Let’s dive a little deeper in what each preview had to say. First up, Ryan McCaffrey’s preview published on IGN.
“In the same way that Max Payne basically forced you to always keep moving, Control does the same – but adds in a bunch of superpowers, a bizarre and compelling setting, and gleefully rips the environment to shreds in the process. My first hands-on with it was everything I hoped for.”
“It has more Max Payne DNA in it than Alan Wake or Quantum Break, and you certainly won’t hear me complain about that. This is no cover shooter; I died when I tried to hang back and wait for things to calm down. Your health won’t recharge here. Instead, killing enemies and soaking up the white bits of life force they drop is how you stay alive and keep moving.”
As a fan of Remedy videogames McCaffrey gives his honest opinion, but also isn’t shy of criticizing Remedy on the poor framerate in some areas. However, he also states the game is still being optimized and things could change considerably.
Moving on to Tom Philip’s preview published at Eurogamer, who praised Control for its tense combat. He also reveals a feature called “Bureau Alerts”, that should keep player occupied beyond the core story.
“But combat is perhaps Control’s strongest suit. Fights are wild, breathless, and encourage plenty of experimentation. I felt like Jesse was learning alongside me as I worked out how best to mix gunplay and power combos, all while floating in mid-air. The Service Pistol, one of the best-looking weapons in pretty much any game, is the only gun in Control. But it comes with multiple forms you can switch between (two can be active in your loadout at any one time) and then tweak using different tiers of weapon mods you’ll find dropped by enemies or in far-off rooms hidden in chests.”
“The launch of Control is just the beginning for its world, Remedy is keen to stress. When you’re done with the main game and side-missions, you’ll be given post-game “Bureau Alerts”, a feature which still remains under wraps. With Control, Remedy is spending time to create something it hopes you’ll want to return to after the end of its core story, that you may still be puzzling over.”
Last but not least, is Matt Cox’s preview at RockPaperShotgun. Here are some of the highlights, much in line with the others:
“I felt like Alice delving into sci-fi wonderland, and asked Kasurinen if he saw Control the same way. “Sure, there is that ‘going down the rabbit hole’ kind of feel to it. Jesse arrives at the Bureau and the deeper she goes into that place, the more strange and complicated it becomes.”
“It’s not perfect. Something felt off about many of the animations, punches killed people without connecting with them, and by the end of my twenty minutes Jesse’s pool of abilities had already started to feel shallow. The telekinesis noises are fantastic though, which makes up for more than you’d think. The thwump of displaced air that accompanies every telekinetic grab might be my new favorite sound. Top five, easy. Some of those combat kinks might get ironed out before release, and I doubt I’ve seen all that Jesse can do.”
“We don’t want to handhold the players and say this is where you need to go at all times, we want the player to stop and look at the world and find their way through it. So you have to pay attention to what’s around you, you can’t just follow a quest marker – we don’t actually have quest markers in the game.”
The articles also contained some new screenshots, some of which I embedded in-between the quotes. Control is shaping up to be one of the most intriguing, beautiful looking games of this year. What’s you opinion on the content you’ve seen so far?
