Control: Ultimate Edition (PS4 and PS5) Review

 Control Ultimate Edition (PS4 and PS5) 8.5/10

Hello everyone and welcome to another game review. Today, I’m going to go over Remedy’s new IP, Control. Control originally came out on August 27, 2019 with the Ultimate Edition releasing on October 20th, 2020. The game was released for PS4, Xbox, PS5, PC, and Switch. Upon release, Control earned widespread acclaim, but also some criticism regarding certain aspects. As someone who has played this on both the PS4 and PS5, I will be going over some very slight changes between the console versions, but ultimately Control was a very fun and interesting time. Let’s begin.

It’s difficult to describe this game's plot properly, so, I’m just going to take an excerpt straight from the game itself. “Jesse Faden arrives at the Oldest House, the Headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, to look for answers to the mysteries of her childhood. Guided into the building by the janitor, Ahti, Jesse finds Zachariah Trench, the Director of the Bureau, shot dead. She picks up the pistol next to the body and is translocated to the Astral Plane. The strange Board encourages her to bind the gun, an Object of Power called the Service Weapon. She succeeds, and the Board informs her that she is now the Director. Jesse is attacked by the Hiss, a hostile force that has possessed the Bureau agents. She avoids its corruption and rescues a handful of uncorrupted agents, including Emily Pope, who briefs her on the situation. The Hiss has invaded the Bureau and its staff, taking control of anyone who wasn’t wearing an HRA - Hedron Resonance Amplifier - a device capable of protecting against the corruption.” From here, Jesse needs to find the Hotline, an Object of Power in the form of an old telephone, in order to understand the Board’s messages and the late Director Trench. After this, Jesse needs to find the rest of the department managers to help her control the Hiss invasion. Her personal reason for being here is to search for her long lost brother Dylan, who was taken by the FBC when they were children back in their hometown of Ordinary. As she sprawls through this massive building, slowly restoring the place with the help of her extra-dimensional entity Polaris, she’ll begin to put the puzzle pieces together. The Altered World Event at Ordinary, The Hiss invasion, and Dylan are all connected.

Alright so as you can see, there is a lot of in-game jargon similar to Death Stranding. Allow me to fill you in. If you want to get straight to the actual review, you can skip this section. First thing are Objects of Power, Altered Items, and Altered World Events (AWE for short). So in this world, there are certain items that are basically haunted. They exhibit paranatural abilities that shouldn’t be normal. Let’s say there’s a fridge. This fridge survived a building collapse. All the drawings that’s on the fridge are stuck there. They can not be removed or burned or altered. Another thing with this fridge is that someone HAS to be staring at it at all times otherwise it’ll shift and alter. If someone that’s suppose to be looking at it looks away, they get hurt. Or let’s say there’s a traffic light that literally recreates the game “Red Light, Green Light”. These objects can appear at random and the paranatural abilities these things give off can be random. These items are Altered Items. Similar to Altered Items, Objects of Power also exhibit extraordinary abilities. What makes these different is that if someone were to make contact with these, they are transported to the Astral Plane, a different dimension where The Board resides. In the Astral Plane, if the person passes the trial, they will be bound to the OoP. When bound, the person will be able to do extraordinary things themselves. So the first OoP Jesse binds after the Service Weapon is a Floppy Disk. By binding it to her, she now has the ability to launch items at her enemies. As you progress through the game, you’ll gain more powers. Altered World Events are the events that Altered Items/Objects of Power are involved with. So let’s say there’s a vending machine that produces whatever you want that can fit in the machine, but you still need to pay the price. If someone finds this and it gets reported to the Bureau, the event of this happening is called an Altered World Event. What happened in Ordinary is an AWE. The origin of the Hiss is kinda spoiler territory, so I’ll skip them. The Oldest House is a building that can’t easily be found. It is fit in its own space in New York. Unless you are actively looking for it and know where to look, you won’t notice it at all. The building is HUGE. There’s four sectors: Executive, Maintenance, Research, and Containment. Within each sector are different departments. This building is probably the size of the Pentagon. Another thing. The building shifts. Rooms and hallways will move and these can happen at any time. To help stabilize these shifts, the Bureau created Control Points. These CPs are basically pillars that help stabilize these areas as these Control Points will never shift. The Board basically runs the Bureau, like a board of directors. They give insight on how certain tasks should be run, but ultimately the Director has the final say. No one knows who exactly The Board is, but they are always accompanied by an inverted, mathematically perfect, black triangle. Also, only the Director can understand what they say. To everyone else, it sounds like mumbled garbage.

Okay onto the actual criticism. The story for the game is great. Lots of world building and there’s so much they can do with this world. The cast of characters are fairly weak though. Jesse is *boring* and I don’t find her all too interesting until near the end of the game and during the DLC expansions. Emily, Dr. Darling, Trench, Langston, and Underhill are the best characters next to Jesse. My favorite is probably being a tie between Darling and Langston. By the way, with every single interaction with Emily, I felt high sexual tension between her and Jesse and it was really weird. I felt this especially during post-game and during “The Foundation”. The least interesting character has to be Marshall, Head of Operations. She’s suppose to be this tough as nails badass, but as for an actual character, she kinda sucks. We get further development with her in “The Foundation”, but as for the base game, she’s just there.

The game’s ending sucks. Okay, let me rephrase that. I was expecting so much more from such a climactic finish. The entire game feels like it’s leading up this massive boss fight with ***** and nothing happens. Yeah there’s a final push to turn off the Slide Projector, but there wasn’t even a final boss. It’s just a bunch of enemies that seem like they’re easier to take out than normal. So after you finish the mission “Polaris”, the game “ends”. There is a fake credit sequence. After this, there’s one more, final mission for the main story. There is some post-game content (not including the DLCs) that’ll occupy your time.

The PS4 version does have some technical issues. If there’s too much going on on-screen, the frame rate will drop immensely. My game crashed one time while I was in the middle of combat.. There’s also some clipping and other minor issues, but the biggest problem is the frame rate. As for the PS5 version, it ran a lot smoother, but wasn’t perfect.

Graphically, the game looks fine. I love the way the offices and labs look. The environments all look great. I will say that the character models look ugly, especially Emily and Arish. Jesse looks somewhat hideous but I feel like I had gotten used to her as I played the game.

Music is okay at best. I really do like the battle music though. Instead of a grand theme like with every other game like this, Control uses drums. Only drums, nothing else. Doing this helps you focus immensely on the combat and depending on the current situation of the battle, the drums will go faster or slower, which really helps settle the mood. Sadly, there are no other recognizable tunes or music in the game, except for one part. So near the end of the game, you’ll need to progress through The Ashtray Maze. After getting an item from Ahti, you are able to traverse this maze. This maze is constantly shifting and you’ll be fighting a lot of enemies here. As you are going through the maze, a song plays from the fictional band The Gods of Asgard. The song is “Take Control” and it’s pretty cool.

Voice acting  on the other hand is actually good here. My favorite voices are Jesse (Courtney Hope), Director Trench (James McCaffrey), Emily Pope (Antonia Bernath), and Alan Wake (Matthew Porretta, who also voiced Dr Darling). I especially love the voice for Alan Wake, as it suits his monologues as he’s writing the story for the AWE Expansion.

Onto gameplay. The game’s map is similar to that of God of War (2018). It’s “open world” but not really. It’s fairly linear but you are able to back track and collect stuff that you couldn’t before. The best way I can describe it is a 3D Metroidvania.

Your main weapon is your Service Weapon. The pistol has no ammo, but it does need to cooldown if you continuously use it. You can change which mode you can use it in (scatter/shotgun, charge/rockets, precision, sniper shot, etc). What sucks is that you can only equip two types of modes at once. If you need to switch to a third, you need to pause the game (most likely mid combat) so that you can switch. This is one of the game’s downsides as the game can easily button map to have you switch between all modes instantly. Alongside your gun, you’ll gain multiple powers as you progress through the game. Launch, Compel (probably my favorite power), Shield, and a couple of others. In order for you to upgrade these abilities, you need ability points. These points are rewarded to you after you finish a mission or find a hidden area. This sounds good in theory, but it’s actually executed badly. So around the middle of the main game, I found myself barely able to level myself up because I wasn’t gaining enough ability points. What they should’ve done is an XP system like with every other game out there. The more enemies you kill, the more XP you gain and if the opponent is stronger, they’ll give you more XP. Once your XP bar fills, you gain an ability point. Rinse and repeat. This would’ve worked out so much better than the system they got going on.

As you play through the game, you’ll be able to mod your weapon forms and Jesse herself. To upgrade these, you’ll find mods all over the map. These will be in loot boxes and they’ll also drop from enemies. You can mod yourself and the gun in the menu. At Control Points, you can upgrade the number of slots you can use for mods for your gun and if you drop enough ability points, you’ll eventually gain mod slots for Jesse. Now here’s what I don't like about this system. There is a loot box system in the game. Thankfully there are no microtransactions, but you are able to gamble away at chances of getting good mods by finding random resources throughout the game. You are able to upgrade your odds to getting better mods, but you are not able to purchase the exact mod you want. Because of this, you are able to waste HOURS of your time trying to get the resources just to get the chance of getting what you want. Personally, I barely touched this as I knew this was just a waste of time. Any and all mods I got were from loot boxes scattered throughout the map and enemies dropping them.

The main story is only like 9 missions long, but there’s a decent amount of areas to explore and the side missions are pretty cool, although I do wish there were more random side missions to do such as finding all of the escaped Altered Items and such. There’s also collectables for you to find. All of the collectables are files and reports that help fill out this world, especially how the FBC works and what they have to deal with on a daily basis. With all of these files, there is A LOT of reading to be done, but it’s worth it because this world is so fascinating.

There are quite a handful of bosses too. I’m not going to go over all of them, but there is one I’d like to discuss. When you get down to the Mold Threshold, Dr. Underhill will ask you to look into the source of all of the mold. When you go into the center of the Pit, there’s a Control Point for you. Right next to it is another hole. This hole leads to the boss fight with Mold-1. This fucking plant can go straight to Hell. It has three heads and you’re fighting it and the battle arena as well. You have to stay constantly moving otherwise you will die. This boss fight took me roughly 15 tries. Once I got the final hit in (I was certain I was going to die again before this happened), I yelled “FINALLY!” This was a very well designed boss and I’ll definitely be remembering it in the future. Great design, great challenge, and I love how the heads do something different. There’s other bosses, but I’ll leave those as a surprise in case you’re interested.

The first DLC is “The Foundation”. In this, you get a distress call from The Board saying you need to get to the Foundation ASAP. Hiss have invaded The building’s foundation and it’s your job to clear them out and restore the Nail, which seems to be the main thing holding the foundation together. In this DLC, we’ll get further info on The Board, Former, and even Marshall. We get new powers that’s exclusive to The Foundation and even a new enemy type. There’s 2-3 extra side missions and even a new collectible: Maneki-nekos. I’m just going to save you the trouble. If you find all of these cats (neko=cat in Japanese), you are rewarded with cat ears. Fucking cat ears! You go through all of this trouble and bullshit of finding these fuckers and you get cat ears. Bruh. Anyway, I liked this DLC, but it opens more questions than answers and I’m hoping a sequel to the game answers these questions.

The second DLC is “Altered World Events”. I like to call this the “Alan Wake Expansion” as it seems to tie up some loose ends with the game Alan Wake. Now, I have not played Alan Wake, but this DLC does a pretty good job at providing context on what happened in Bright Falls (if you read all the files). In this DLC, you get to fight The Darkness, another extradimensional entity that’s from Alan Wake. The Shadow and The Hiss have fused together in That-Once-Was-Hartman, a character that was locked up after the events of Alan Wake and kept in the Investigations Sector of the Bureau. After the Hiss invaded, the sector was locked off and kept hidden until Alan Wake reached out to Jesse through the Hotline. In this DLC, you’ll get a new weapon form, Surge (which I didn’t even use), and a new enemy to fight, Flying Rangers. This DLC was good, but I feel like I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more had I played Alan Wake beforehand. The final boss for this was cool, but I feel like it was a bit lackluster. Immediately after you defeat the boss, the DLC officially ends. In all honesty, I feel like both DLCs opened more questions than answered them.

In this DLC, I do need to talk about one of the best side missions I’ve ever played. So if you have been reading the reports, then you know that in the Fra Mauro AWE, there is a prisoner here. This “guy” is an alien that has mimicked one of the astronauts. He knows English, but he can’t speak worth shit. All of his sentences are a jumbled mess and it’s some of the funniest shit ever. He calls the head researcher “the head gerbil”. He asks you to bring him the “head”. Completely confused, Jesse is just bringing him random shit and it’s hilarious. Eventually, you figure out he literally means “head” and if you have been paying attention, then you’ll know what you’re looking for. You never see this guy because he’s imprisoned in a shelter, but this whole side mission had me laughing my ass off.

Overall, the game was fun and it really got my brain thinking on its story and how much potential it has. It does have issues, but none of them should be a deal breaker. I highly recommend this game if you’re looking for a great story and fun gameplay. Again, the game does have issues (mainly technical issues and questionable design choices). The game took me probably a good 40 hours (I’m estimating here) to complete. That’s including both DLCs. The game is also fairly easy to platinum. I was playing the game naturally and I was unlocking trophy after trophy. There were only 3 trophies that I had to go out of my way for. Honestly there’s a lot more I can go over with the game, but that’s spoiler territory. Anyway, I’ll end it here.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.