CONTROL Ultimate Edition

Fun for the paranormal lore, but hit-or-miss TPS combat and okay story. I played this game because it appears a lot in media advertising for games—even though it's 7 years old. I got it from the Humble Monthly in 2021, so Steam saying I had the Ultimate Edition when I only had the Standard Edition (and had to get keys for the DLCs since Steam doesn't sell them standalone anymore) was confusing. Overall, I enjoyed most of the game, but a couple of elements left me underwhelmed and so it was just an okay TPS. The Positives: -I enjoyed the early combat and story and really liked the paranormal elements. I liked how real-life unexplained phenomena were in-game paranormal events that the FBC was studying. -The universe-building element of the game is good for the developer. I'm not sure whether it strengthens or weakens Alan Wake to have that game explained by this game's lore, but it's definitely good for big fans of the two games to have that connection. I played AW years ago but don't remember much of it. I thought it was a nice connection, but to have the FBC be studying Alan Wake and Alan Wake be writing about FBC seemed like a paradox of sorts. -The middle was the best for me. It was a good combination of more-than-basic combat but not enemies attacking you from everywhere along with interesting story with new answers with every item. -The abilities were cool. The weapons plus your special abilities used in combination made for interesting combat. You could set it up where you shoot, use abilities, and shoot again. That forced you to vary your gameplay while giving you an alternative to running around waiting to reload. The Negatives: -The inventory being limited to 24 mods was the most annoying part of the entire game. At first, it's no big deal—you can keep 1-3 of almost every mod you get for most of the game. But then, at the end of the game and for the DLCs, you are always at or near the 24-mod limit, needing to destroy one to pick up a new one. If you're like me and like to keep at least one of each mod, you're going to the inventory screen every two minutes max. -It got frustrating when enemies appeared when I didn't want them to and wouldn't appear when I wanted them to...not to mention that enemy spawns are somewhat random, thus giving you an easy round followed by a brutal combination of healing orb, flying guys, flying chargers, and the peek-a-boo guy. The peek-a-boo guy is the most annoying enemy in the game—one-shot to 1HP, and if you're fighting other enemies, you have a high chance of dying. -When I got to the DLCs, my game performance significantly dropped. It crashed a few times, and sometimes my controller would disconnect for a few seconds. It was very strange and wasn't doing that during the main game. -A common issue with games like this with temporary flying and giant chasms everywhere—you're going to accidentally fall down pits a lot. I fell down three or four times during end-game combat because there are just pits all around you, and I fell down another few times by accidentally hitting the jump/hover button one too many times and falling with no way of recovering. -A minor-but-noticeable issue is the dialogue. They have bad dialogue habits in this game—enough for me to notice—such as Faden conversing with Emily and having one-liner thoughts at the end of each exchange. By far the most annoying was the habit media writers have with female protagonists: I don't know why they do this, but they always have female protagonists talk about themselves. You can literally ask every person you can speak to in the game about how they feel about you as director, and you refer to yourself as the director and your ability to do the job as the director at least two-dozen times. And, as usual for this bad habit, everyone has to say how amazing she is. It's eye-roll-inducing when you see it so often, but given that it came out in 2019 when media was doing much, much worse activist dialogue, it's annoying but not game-wrecking. -Guns were weak compared to launch. I launched for 75% of my combat. Kind of hurts the combat when you just spam R1 over and over again most of the time. -The game just ends. It's the 2026 equivalent to a Nintendo one-screen-of-mispelled-English ending screen. I am not joking when I say that the ending scene is nearly identical to the scene you get within the first 30 minutes of the game (and I already mentioned above that it's yet another self-congratulatory scene). Overall, I enjoyed most of the game. The main game was good for about 2/3 of it but got annoying sometimes at the end and with the DLC levels' inventory management and RNG enemy spawns. I didn't find that the DLC items really did too much with the lore (I'd say ~3-5 were interesting; the rest were just short, inconsequential media) and am not sure about the Alan Wake tie-in, but it was better DLC than 80% of the nonsense out there (e.g., skins/costumes). I enjoyed playing it for the most part, but it needed to have slightly better combat design, inventory, dialogue, and ending scenes to be great. It was good...but could've been a classic.