Control Resonant

Hello friends! The market was pretty busy this month. But if you ask me, the game everyone talked about most came from REMEDY. These are the Finnish masters who made MAX PAYNE, ALAN WAKE and CONTROL, the one that locked everybody inside that weird concrete building five or seven years ago. This time they're taking us out to Manhattan. The game came out digitally on 24 September 2026 for Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. If you're ready, let's move on to the game.

First, the credits. REMEDY both developed and published the game. ANNAPURNA PICTURES is co-financier and co-producer, as part of the two companies' strategic partnership. The creative director is Mikael Kasurinen. The standard edition costs €59.99 / £49.99 / $59.99. The Digital Deluxe edition costs €69.99 and gives you an AWE field outfit for Dylan, a special artefact (a wallet), a starter resource pack, a digital artbook and the game's soundtrack. For those of you who like a box, the PS5 and Xbox SteelBook editions hit the shelves on 15 October. Friends on a Mac will have to wait a bit: the Mac version for Steam and the App Store was announced for "in 2026", with no firm date.

Now on to our game. This time we don't play Jesse Faden but her big brother, Dylan Faden. Anyone who played the first game will remember him. We're dealing with a paranormal disaster in a Manhattan whose reality has been bent out of shape. We've got Dylan's powers and the ABERRANT. The Aberrant (that is, a shape-shifting melee weapon) takes several different forms, and you use it against ordinary enemies and giant bosses alike. The genre has changed too. The first CONTROL was an action game with narrow corridors. RESONANT is an action RPG. Critics call it a semi-open structure, and the Steam tags say Action RPG, Hack and Slash and Open World. It's single-player only. According to REMEDY, newcomers to the series can jump in with no trouble at all.

Did a genre change this big pay off? The players' answer is pretty clear. As of 28 October the Steam page shows "Very Positive": 92% of 9,355 English reviews are positive, and the rate is 92% again across the 10,354 reviews written in the last thirty days. The critics mostly liked it as well. Metacritic sits somewhere between 83 and 85 depending on the platform, with the Xbox version lowest at 81 to 82. On OpenCritic the average is around 84 to 85, and roughly 84 to 85% of critics recommend it. These numbers are still moving, so don't memorise them as gospel. The spread of scores is wide, too: on one side a few outlets gave it full marks, on the other some said 76 and three out of five.

Players loved seeing a bent New York through REMEDY's own stylish way of presenting things.

The praise keeps landing in the same places. Art direction, the cast and the sheer inventiveness of the city get talked about most. Players loved seeing a bent New York through REMEDY's own stylish way of presenting things. Many of them think it's better than the first game. One interesting note on the music side too: the opening credits play "Upperhand", written by APOCALYPTICA, with Katrine of Kalandra on vocals. A well-known band writing a track just for a game is always a plus in my book.

But there's another side to the coin. I can practically see the question forming in your heads: "If it's that good, what's wrong with it?" At the top of the complaints is combat getting repetitive. The Aberrant that shines in the first hours starts to bore a chunk of players in the second half of the game. The bosses are seen as weak. When the bosses in an action RPG are weak, the ordinary enemies have to carry the fighting, and after a while that load gets heavy. The open map isn't filled with the same care everywhere, and some areas lag behind the others. The story has dropped the first game's strange, closed-in structure for a more familiar mould. And not everybody found Dylan as interesting as Jesse.

A separate warning for the PC crowd. People who switch on path tracing (realistic lighting that works out the path of light ray by ray) at high settings report the frame rate jumping around. Don't trust your graphics card too much: try medium settings first. The game is on GeForce NOW as well. If your machine is on the weak side, the cloud could be a way out.

Now for the verdict. CONTROL RESONANT took a risky step: out of a closed building into an open city, from a tight action game to a big RPG. And for the most part that risk paid off. A 92% Steam rating is no accident. The game's city and its presentation really do something. So why doesn't it go above 90? Because the heart of an action game is its combat, and that's exactly where players complain most. The fighting gets monotonous as the hours go by, and the bosses don't rescue it. Why doesn't it drop to 75? Because even the repetition complaints come from people who praise the first half of the game. There's a solid foundation here, and a city with REMEDY's signature all over it.

If you ask me, friends who put weird atmospheres and stylish presentation ahead of combat depth can run to the store page. Just don't pay for the Deluxe: an outfit and an artbook aren't worth ten euros, the standard edition does the job. Those of you looking for pure hack and slash should wait for a sale. If you've played it, write and tell me your favourite Aberrant form. I'm waiting for your letters. Good luck...