Since I have kind of grown tired of Diablo 4 - which lasted me for nearly 150 hours and is definitely a great game - I have been trying to find a new home as far as gaming is concerned. I had heard that Control is a metroidvania, and that is one of my favorite types of games so the fact that it was included in my PS-Plus membership had me running over there to check it out.
I really enjoyed the game at the start. It has a very interesting story, simple enough controls, and some pretty fantastic graphics.
This notion of mine that I finally found a good game lasted for about 90 minutes of gameplay and then the real dirt about this game kicked in hard.
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The deal here is that you have the ability to bend space and time to some degree even though you yourself are not entirely sure of why or how you can use these powers. There is some sort of evil that has taken over this government building and perhaps even further outside of it and you are tasked with restoring it since you are the only person that can fight against it.
It's kind of cool because it eases you into the controls of the game in an interesting way that doesn't feel like a tutorial, but is a tutorial.
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You have some sort of pistol that you shoot at people and it reloads with some sort of magical ammo, you can run up on people and melee them with some sort of force push, and as the game advances you are also able to manipulate your surroundings and throw lots of things into the distance at enemies. It's pretty wild actually and the game just kind of works for the first hour. Then things get messy.
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As you progress you are expected to go to new areas to conquer whatever is next as you would expect. However, you can't really tell where you are supposed to go outside of some very vague explanation in the top left corner. So you naturally would go to your map for help right? Well don't count on that being much help because honestly, this is one of the worst maps I have ever seen in any game. There are multiple floors in the building but yet the map doesn't indicate which one you are on, or whether the other levels are accesible above or below you, or even if they are accessible at all. There are no indications of doors, opened or otherwise, and sometimes you think you are going down a hallway to what you think is your destination only to have a wall there that isn't on the map at all.
The map is basically useless and if you do a search for "control game map" basically everyone is talking about how the map feature in this game is pathetic, frustrating, and useless.
The apologists for the game say that this is because the devs wanted you to become familiar with your environment. The devs never said this but for every genuine complaint about any game, there is always going to be an apologist that will make up an excuse. The map is awful and seeing as how this game isn't new, I can't believe they never did anything about it.
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You make it to the first real battle with relative ease and then you are faced with a real battle for the first time in the game. Like most people, I tried to use what I learned in the simulation too literally and got my ass handed to me by enemies because I was standing still. The game then gave me a tip during the loading screen that standing still is not a good idea.... ok, fair enough, I wont make that mistake again. It loaded me to the room just before that battle and I went back into it and I cleaned the floor with the mobs on my 2nd try armed with this new knowledge. I then had a cutscene that was actually quite interesting and was rewarded with my first ever "checkpoint" in the game.
Lord if I had known how bad the game was going to get from that point forward as far as moving around was concerned I would have stopped right then and there.
From that point forward at least in all of the rest of the game that I managed to see, this is where you will respawn after every death. I suppose that isn't that big of a deal if it wasn't for the fact that due to the previously mentioned map issues, that navigation wasn't such a pain. Normally, when I ended up somewhere and a new battle began, I had no idea if I was actually supposed to be in that room where the new battle happened or not.
In another instance I ran down some red lighted hallway that insta-killed me because I don't yet have whatever power is necessary to survive there. Upon these deaths I was respawned back at my one and only checkpoint.
To make matters worse, not only are you respawned back there, but all of the things you did up to that point are reset. Meaning that ever trivial enemy you have killed, every piece of collectible horse-shit on a desk that you picked up, every piece of something that you had to move out of the way to go down a hallway, every EVERYTHING has been reset and you have to do it again.
It took me 3 or 4 tries before I finally remembered which way to go because again, the fucking map is useless.
All of this is annoying, but not a gamebreaker. The gamebreaker looks more like this.
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The load time between death and respawn is just nuts. I am on a ps5 and I can't even imagine how long this must take on a ps4. It kind of reminded me about how long it takes to "zone" in Destiny 2... so long, that it just makes you mad.
Again, this wouldn't be so bad of a thing if it wasn't for a culmination of other things such as navigating at all being a pain, all the areas being completely reset, and that you have to sit through all dialogue and collectible pick up just to get back to something like say, a boss fight. But here is the one thing that finally had me at my breaking point and resulted in me deleting the game: You are 1 or 2-shot killable at this point in the game as well.
So now you are contending with a lengthy walk back completing tedious things along the way, with a map that doesn't help at all, to finally arrive at a boss fight, only to get 1 or 2-shotted by something that you didn't even see happen. After all of that you have the joy of looking at a loading screen for upwards of a full minute only to get to do it again. Who is actually going to endure this?
Not me, that's for sure.
It's a shame because the controls, the story, the graphics, everything about this game is extremely sound - but these rather major problems are enough to make me walk away from this game without thinking twice about it. It's shame because the story is exceptional in this and that opinion is coming from a guy that is extremely difficult to please when it comes to video game narratives.
Video games need to sort their shit out in QC when it comes to things like this because I will not endure this.
Control is currently part of the PS-Plus Extra catalog, but I cannot recommend that people play it. This issue will not get resolved as the game has already been out for while and they have no incentive to repair it anymore. Because of this I am now going to be very hesitant to get involved with anything that Remedy Entertainment produces since a company that sucks at load times in one game, tends to repeat this in others.