Control Ultimate Edition Review Summary

Dynamic telekinetic combat system: Combat is a major highlight, combining third-person shooting with telekinetic abilities like levitation, object manipulation, and environmental destruction. Players enjoy the fluidity, creativity, and satisfying physics interactions during battles.

Unique and immersive atmosphere: The game’s setting is praised for its surreal, David Lynch-inspired atmosphere, blending brutalist architecture, eerie sound design, and immersive world-building. Players highlight the tension, mystery, and cinematic presentation as standout features.

Engaging narrative and deep lore: The game features a compelling storyline with intricate lore, often compared to SCP and delivered through collectibles, documents, and environmental storytelling. Players appreciate the depth, mystery, and gradual reveals that keep them engaged.

Engaging side quests and collectibles: Side quests and collectibles add significant replay value, offering meaningful exploration, lore expansion, and unique challenges. Players enjoy the variety and depth they bring to the overall experience.

Destructible environments enhance gameplay: The game’s physics system allows for highly interactive and destructible environments, adding depth to combat and exploration. Players appreciate the realism and creativity enabled by throwing objects, breaking structures, and leveraging terrain.

Repetitive and Uninspired Gameplay: Gameplay loops are criticized for being monotonous, with repetitive side quests, enemy respawns, and combat encounters. Players highlight a lack of variety in missions, puzzles, and enemy types, making the experience feel tedious over time.

Poor Combat Design & Balance: Players frequently report that combat is repetitive, frustrating, and poorly balanced. Issues include excessive difficulty spikes, unfair boss mechanics, and repetitive enemy encounters that disrupt exploration. The scaling system and lack of meaningful progression exacerbate frustration.

Frustrating Navigation & Map Design: Navigation is a major pain point due to confusing, multi-layered maps, poor objective tracking, and unclear indicators. Players frequently get lost, leading to unnecessary backtracking and frustration, especially in dark or complex areas.

Blurry Textures & Visual Glitches: Frequent visual issues, such as blurry textures, missing assets, and graphical artifacts, detract from immersion. These problems persist even on high settings and are exacerbated by poor optimization and VRAM usage.

Unsatisfying Ending: The game’s conclusion is widely criticized as anticlimactic, abrupt, or unresolved. Players express disappointment with the lack of a grand finale, unclear plot resolutions, and an underwhelming final boss fight.

Narrative-Driven Exploration: Lore and storytelling are delivered through collectibles (documents, audio logs, videos) and environmental clues, encouraging non-linear exploration and puzzle-solving to uncover the narrative.

Metroidvania-Style Progression: Gameplay includes ability-gated areas, backtracking, and unlockable upgrades (e.g., weapons, powers), with enemies scaling to player progression to maintain challenge.

Supernatural Gunplay Fusion: The game blends third-person shooter mechanics with supernatural abilities, creating a fast-paced, skill-based combat system that rewards alternating between guns and powers.

Loot and Upgrade Mechanics: Players farm resources to upgrade weapons/abilities via randomized loot or crafting systems, though some criticize the system for lacking depth or being overly numerical.

Confusing Level Design: While levels feature unique designs (e.g., brutalist architecture), some players criticize them as linear, corridor-heavy, or confusing, impacting exploration and backtracking.

Inconsistent FPS performance: FPS stability varies drastically, with drops to 5–30 FPS even on high-end hardware (e.g., RTX 2060, 4070 Ti). Stuttering and freezing occur in demanding areas, though some players achieve stable performance with tweaks.

Poor optimization across hardware: The game is poorly optimized for both high-end and lower-end systems, with VRAM-heavy effects (e.g., destruction physics) causing blurry textures and performance drops. Ultrawide monitors and mid-range GPUs also suffer.

DX12/DX11 graphical issues: Players report widespread graphical problems in both DirectX 11 and 12 modes, including texture blurring, black squares, micro-stuttering, and resolution drops. These issues persist regardless of settings or hardware, suggesting fundamental optimization flaws.

DLSS and MSAA compatibility flaws: DLSS and MSAA implementations introduce flickering, visual artifacts, and performance inconsistencies. While DLAA (DLSS at native resolution) helps, some players report reduced visual quality without FPS gains.

Texture loading failures: Textures frequently fail to load or degrade to low resolution, requiring game resets. Slow texture streaming exacerbates the issue, particularly in DX12 mode.

Ideal for lore-rich supernatural fans: The game is highly recommended for players who enjoy deep narratives, supernatural themes, and lore-heavy experiences like SCP, Lovecraftian horror, or Alan Wake. Its atmospheric and immersive storytelling is a recurring highlight.

Atmosphere may polarize players: The game’s surreal, uncanny atmosphere and mysticism are divisive. While some praise its uniqueness, others find it off-putting or overly niche.

Avoid if tech issues persist: Players experiencing performance issues or bugs are advised to avoid the game until patches are released or request refunds if problems remain unresolved.

Not for fast-paced action seekers: Players looking for pure, linear, or fast-paced action may find the game unsuitable. It prioritizes narrative and atmosphere over relentless combat, which can feel slow or repetitive to some.

Best purchased on sale: While the game is highly recommended, many reviews suggest waiting for a discount (e.g., $25 or ~200 rubles) due to its flaws or performance issues. Full-price purchases are often debated.

Varied playtime expectations: Players report differing completion times, ranging from 12 hours for the main story to 40+ hours for 100% completion. The difficulty is rated as moderate (3/5).

Alan Wake universe connections unclear: Reviewers note hints at ties to the *Alan Wake* universe but criticize the lack of clear establishment or payoff. Comparisons to Remedy’s other titles are frequent.

Polarizing engagement despite strengths: Some players describe the game as 'boring' despite acknowledging redeeming qualities, while others are inspired to speedrun or praise sections like the *Ashtray Maze*.

DLC plans impact purchase decisions: Mentions of upcoming DLCs create hesitation among players, with some delaying purchases until post-launch content is evaluated. *Foundation DLC* is specifically praised for its story and exploration.

Visual and tonal comparisons to other games: Players draw parallels to *Hitman* (UI/text), *Prototype* (gameplay), and *SCP* (setting/tone), suggesting the game borrows familiar elements from multiple genres.