Control Resonant trades the claustrophobic dread of the Oldest House for the sprawl of a fractured Manhattan, and according to Eurogamer’s review, published September 18, that trade comes at a real cost. The verdict that emerges is a mixed one: this is a more ambitious, more action-RPG-flavoured sequel that gains scale but loses a lot of what made the original Control so distinctive.

The setup picks up after the first game’s lockdown of the Hiss inside the Federal Bureau of Control’s headquarters, a containment effort Jesse Faden oversaw for seven years. Her brother Dylan, freshly out of a coma and no longer possessed, wakes up just as the Hiss escapes into Manhattan and the city gets cut off from the outside world. He spends the rest of the game helping the Bureau manage the fallout while searching for Jesse, who may not even be sharing his dimensional plane anymore.

Where Control kept players trapped inside a shape-shifting Brutalist building, Resonant hands them a big, marker-heavy map that Remedy insists, somewhat defensively, is not technically an open world. It’s worth noting that this hands-on account is one reviewer’s read on a pre-release build; broader aggregate reception is a separate conversation this piece isn’t attempting to settle. Readers who enjoyed The Escapist’s take on No More Room in Hell 2 will recognise the shape of this kind of assessment – atmosphere and mechanics weighed against each other rather than tallied into a single easy number.

A Bigger World, a Weaker Focus

The Oldest House worked because its shifting architecture made the building itself untrustworthy, a moody cocoon where every hallway might not lead where it did five minutes ago. Manhattan, fragmented and flipped upside down by interdimensional physics, is a fun premise on paper, but according to the review it dilutes Control’s smart, specific weirdness into something closer to Marvel-style blockbuster flatness. Climbing to a rooftop and seeing every pocket of Hiss or Mold laid out on the horizon kills the suspense that used to come from not knowing what was behind the next door.

That openness also invites exactly the kind of busywork Control never needed: world events built around supporting FBC rangers in the field, defending cargo, protecting workers, and eventually a full chore board of escort missions and fetch quests. Dylan’s handler, Agent Zoe de Vera, does solid work as the buffer between him and a Bureau that spent his childhood treating him like a lab specimen, but even she can’t rescue the pacing when the game sends Dylan off on a nothingburger errand moments after a major plot reveal. The review calls the cumulative effect narrative sprawl – an inversion of the tight, purposeful shape that defined Jesse’s story in the first game.

The family material fares little better. Faults, the interdimensional “thin” places where Dylan senses Jesse, unlock traversal abilities but mostly deliver repetitive leaping and dashing wrapped around childhood-trauma flashbacks that the review found melodramatic and often better left unsaid.

Combat, Traversal, and Action-RPG Systems

Dylan fights with the Aberrant, a paranatural metal weapon that morphs to suit the situation and, notably, houses a familiar presence carried over from the first game. Skill trees now lean into recognisable action-RPG conventions, letting players build toward high critical damage or crowd control and area-of-effect output, with new abilities unlocked by defeating boss-tier enemies called Resonants.

In practice, though, the review is blunt: combat has not really improved. The Glaive ability, a big knockback swing, gets the job done without feeling particularly satisfying, and it takes a secondary fire-punch skill – oddly effective against Mold specifically – to produce anything like real enjoyment. Gravity and plane-shifting mechanics complicate the puzzle side of traversal in more interesting ways, timed movement between planes and precise falls demanding real attention, though the review also flags getting stuck behind a wall in a chasm at least once.

The bigger frustration is tonal. Dylan swooping around the city rescuing puppies and helping civilians plays like routine superheroing, the kind of thing a dedicated action game already does better. It’s not why anyone signs up for a Control sequel, and the review says as much directly.

Where Resonant Recaptures Control’s Weirdness

The game finally clicks, by the review’s account, once Dylan descends beneath the Oldest House into the Underpass. There, an understated cosmic-horror workplace drama unfolds through reports and recordings against monolithic office columns and landscapes that evoke Zdzisław Beksiński, and it’s here that some of Resonant’s best writing and voice work live. A later, genuinely unexpected genre swerve deeper in the Underpass is likely to delight plenty of players even if it left this reviewer bewildered.

Dylan’s drawing mechanic – recreating half-remembered moments with found objects and sketches – is charming in a scrappy, low-key way, right up until the game demands a dragon built from subway cones and the last piece proves elusive. Visually and technically, Remedy’s craft is undiminished: the FBC uniform design, Matthew Porretta’s screen time as Casper Darling, and the stylised shadow-puppetry sequences all land as load-bearing pillars of the wider universe. Readers drawn to games built around a single oppressive premise might also enjoy The Escapist’s review of Dystopicon for a smaller-scale point of comparison.

Still, there’s only so much a repeated skyline of city blocks and same-y military blockades can carry, and the review argues that Resonant leans too hard on quirky spectacle – weird dogs, floating vending machines, warring aliens – as a stand-in for the substance the first game earned more honestly.

Pros and Cons
  • Pros: Strong visual and technical presentation throughout.
  • Pros: The Underpass delivers some of the game’s sharpest writing and voice performances.
  • Pros: Ambitious gravity and plane-shifting mechanics, plus a genuinely surprising genre detour.
  • Pros: The drawing and tableau feature is silly, charming, and oddly compelling.
  • Cons: Combat still hasn’t meaningfully improved from the first game.
  • Cons: The open-city structure dilutes Control’s tightly wound atmosphere and suspense.
  • Cons: Narrative sprawl and repetitive chore-board tasks disrupt pacing.
  • Cons: Marker-heavy navigation and gravity puzzles can turn frustrating.
  • Cons: Quirky spectacle doesn’t consistently replace the original’s distinctive substance.
Verdict

Based on what’s on record here, Control Resonant is an ambitious but unevenly focused sequel – at its best when it slows down for concentrated workplace horror and odd side stories, and at its weakest when it’s asking players to fling Dylan across another city block for the tenth time. The available excerpt of the review doesn’t include a final score or a completed conclusion, so no definitive number should be attached to this assessment.

Players who want a bigger, melee-driven action RPG and can tolerate some repetition and narrative sprawl may well find plenty to like in the finished game. Anyone hoping for the sharply contained, unnervingly bureaucratic weirdness of the original Oldest House, though, should go in with tempered expectations – that particular magic, on this evidence, doesn’t fully survive the move to Manhattan.

The post Manhattan’s Sprawl Blunts Control Resonant’s Weirdness appeared first on The Escapist.