It’s been seven years since the Federal Bureau of Control was locked down to try and contain the Hiss. It didn’t work. The Hiss has now escaped out into New York City, transforming and affecting all those who end up hearing it… but that’s not the only problem facing the agents trying to contain the situation out in New York, as a thoroughly different AWE is emerging. It would be pretty handy for a Director to be around to neutralise the threat, wouldn’t it?
Well, Jessie Faden from the first game isn’t here, but her brother is, and she’s passing the baton along for Control Resonant. Quite violently, it should be said, snapping Dylan out of his coma and back to the real world. And what a real world it turns out to be, as he emerges into the city after cautiously stepping through the familiar, but even more destroyed hallways of The Oldest House.
The full extent of the situation quickly becomes clear, with the Hiss running rampant and creating monstrous transformations of the people it encounters, and with the environments folding back in on themselves like a factorial or recursive artwork. It will, inevitably, draw some comparisons to the first Doctor Strange movie and to the city-folding scene of Inception, but it truthfully feels like its own thing.
Dylan is uniquely capable of navigating this, with a big bounding leap and a snappy dodge quickly enhanced with a double jump, a mannequin-like hover that has him dangling and floating through the air, and a rapid dash ability. Remedy has constructed an abstract playground out of the utterly familiar, so Dylan is leaping across rooftops and ledges that are at all the wrong kind of heights when out in the open world. But that’s just a taster of the mind-bending nature of what Remedy has crafted elsewhere.
Fighting back against the Hiss, Dylan doesn’t have Jessie’s transforming gun, but rather a shape-shifting length of rebar. He’ll have to get up close and personal with enemies in a way that Jessie didn’t have to, and clobber them into submission. It’s Character Action or Action RPG combat as opposed to third person shooter, and while that’s a first for Remedy, it’s slick and satisfying to play, with a great sense of weight and heft to dishing out blows from Dylan, and just the right amount of signposting and help to evade incoming hits – this is all dodging as opposed to parrying, which is absolutely my style of melee.
There’s a choice between multiple primary and secondary moves, as well as a combo finisher that’s tacked on at the end of a string of light attacks. There’s equal parts personal preference and some situational needs to picking which to equip, starting with one before unlocking other options later in the game. I personally leant towards a rapid stabbing move for my main, compared to the sweeping scything move that felt better for crowd control, but you can mix and match styles between that and the heavy attack, creating a hammer to slam down on enemies, a drill to plunge into them or a nunchuk-like sweeping attack.
This is then augmented by the abilities that you learn, giving you flame punches, rock shields that let you bowl into and stagger enemies by dashing through them, ground pounds and more. Your abilities are charged up by dishing out regular hits, forcing you to mix and match, to juggle enemies and bounce between targets. In a nice touch, you can set two loadouts of abilities and quickly switch between them.
The battles are fast and frenetic, the enemies posing varied challenges that you need to manage and prioritise, and it absolutely got the better of me on a few occasions. There’s some balancing still to do, but the laser-firing Hiss are always the most urgent foe to take down, and then the other Heavy Hiss that are the key to ending a fight – Fodder enemies will continue to spawn until the big ones have been defeated.
There’s definitely a more twisted look and feel to the Hiss, compared to the haunted security guards and floating office chair guys that remain the most memorable imagery from the first game. Here the Hiss has taken the human form and stretched them out into a blurry tentacle limb to try and slap you with, flattened skin to make them like flying chipmunks, and beefed them up to have giant balls to roll at you with. And then there’s the haunted New York bus, eternally on fire and crashing, but now upended to face the floor and spewing out more and more fodder until you can smash it into submission.
You would expect the boss battles to be a highlight, and they are. The first in the game takes the giant top half of a human head – one that looks like a frighteningly enlarged Olivia Wilde, if you ask me – which has use of telekinetic powers to fight you. It’s a strong and distinctive visual in a game filled with them. It’s a pretty fun fight as well, still getting used to Dylan’s early attacks and abilities by chasing it around the arena, and leans into the idea of clashing paranatural events.
But the surface transformations of New York are really just the beginning. Jumping ahead to a story mission deeper into the game, with a more powered-up Dylan in my control, and you’re tasked with heading down into a sinkhole anomaly to place some trackers or beacons or some such thing. Immediately you see the kaleidoscopic way that this former apartment building has been transformed, and gravity has been made all topsy-turvy too. There’s a baffling fight against a near-invisible Hiss, trying to track it across identical-looking sets of walls and floors and strike it down, but that builds into an utterly disorientating maze of identikit apartment rooms, following a song and flickering blue light of different TVs to find my way back out. It’s a special moment, and I can’t wait to see how Remedy has leant the world this affectation in other levels and corners of the game. Layer on the studio’s continued obsession with applying analogue videography to its digital worlds, and this is truly something special.
Control Resonant is up against it with its launch date set for 24th September, with a whole host of other big hitters set to arrive around the same time, but it’s shaping up to be a special game that deserves your attention. It’s a big risk for them to jump into a different genre for the game’s combat, but it’s excellently satisfying and married to such a distinctive world and visual style.
