Reviewed on: PC
Code supplied by the publisher
Remedy has a unique reputation, and CONTROL: Resonant does nothing to damage it in fact, it cements it firmly in place as one of the most talented studios ever. This is a polished, gorgeous, technically impressive piece of work from a studio that has never really shipped anything less. My expectations were high going in and they didn’t let me down.
Every area looks right or wrong, depending on the situation whether right side up, sideways or upside down, every system holds together, and the whole thing runs the way a game of this scope should run rather than the way most of them actually do. On that front alone it's a 10. Nothing here feels rushed or half-finished, which in 2026 is worth saying out loud and deserves the highest praise.
We got our code a bit later than some outlets, which turned out to be useful. It gave me a reason to go back and replay the first game before diving in, and that experience changed how I read this one. The melee combat is the focus here and it’s a nice change of pace from the shooting in the first game and it's genuinely engaging, with a weight and rhythm that makes fights satisfying in a way the original never quite managed. The problem is that it doesn't sustain. By the back half I was fighting the same encounters with the same tools and going through motions I'd already done hundreds of times, hours earlier. There are also places where Resonant feels like a step sideways or even backward from its predecessor, which is a strange thing to say about a sequel this accomplished, but it's the honest read after playing both close together.
The presentation is where Resonant fully pulls ahead. The graphics and sound match the original at minimum and frequently surpass it, and the creature and encounter design goes to genuinely strange places and I’m all in! Some of these fights are beautiful and deeply unsettling at the same time, which is the sweet spot Remedy has been nailing since the very beginning. There's a fight roughly two thirds in that I'm still thinking about, and not because it was difficult.
The audio deserves its own paragraph, honestly. Sound does an enormous amount of work here, building dread in rooms where nothing is happening yet. Every audio cue and music beat is a masterpiece. ‘Nuff said.
In the end, scoring this was harder than I expected. The repetitive stretches are real and they pulled my rating down more than once while I was playing. But the polish, the technical execution, and the storytelling kept dragging it back up, and by the end the good outweighed the frustrating by a comfortable margin.
This is a very good game with a soft middle, and it's worth your time even when it's testing your patience.
