Control Resonant, Two and a Half Weeks Later: How Remedy’s Melee Gamble Landed

LOS ANGELES

Two and a half weeks ago, Remedy Entertainment made the biggest bet of its recent history: a sequel to 2019’s Control that trades the original’s telekinetic gunplay for heavy melee combat and action-RPG structure — and launched it straight into the teeth of the busiest September the industry has seen in years. Control Resonant arrived September 24 on PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X/S, sharing its launch day with Silent Hill: Townfall and trailing Marvel’s Wolverine by nine days, with Grand Theft Auto VI looming on the horizon. So how did it land? The reviews say: well, with an asterisk. The players say: very well. And Remedy has been patching since day one.

The game follows Dylan Faden, who wakes from a seven-year coma and sets out to find his sister Jesse while paranatural horrors run wild through a warped Manhattan. It is Remedy’s first self-published blockbuster-scale sequel, and the studio backed it with what it described as its largest marketing campaign ever — including a release-date trailer at June’s State of Play set to Vilma Jää’s “Manalan mailla.” Deluxe Edition buyers on PS5 got 48-hour early access starting September 22; physical editions for PS5 and Xbox arrive October 15, and a macOS version is scheduled for later this year.

The scores: mid-80s across the board

The review embargo lifted September 18, six days before launch, and the aggregates settled quickly into the low-to-mid 80s — exactly where they have stayed. Metacritic lists the game at 83 out of 100 on both PC and PlayStation 5 and 81 on Xbox Series X/S, good for “generally favorable.” OpenCritic shows 86% of critics recommending it. Early launch-week tracking had it a touch higher — 84 on both aggregators with an 86% recommend rate and a 93rd-percentile ranking — and GamingBolt’s early-October check had an 83 Metascore from 75 reviews. The numbers drift as late reviews arrive; the shape of the consensus does not: firmly in the 80s, roughly in line with the original Control, which scored 82 on PS4 and 85 on PC.

What makes the reception interesting is that the highest and lowest scores are built on the exact same observation. VGC’s perfect 5/5 framed the melee pivot as a genre gamble that pays off. GameSpot’s 9/10 praised impeccable combat design alongside the studio’s signature strangeness. IGN’s 8/10 called it a great addition to the Remedyverse, complimenting the combat system and design while noting the late game can grow tedious and the RPG mechanics offer flexibility without much depth. Then the holdouts: PC Gamer’s 76 out of 100 pointed to too many hours of middling combat weighing down an otherwise magnificent setting, and Eurogamer’s 3 out of 5 argued the bigger, more action-RPG-oriented sequel leaves some of the original’s magic behind. Same trade-off, opposite verdicts.

What the skeptics actually say

The dissent is worth reading on its own terms, because it is specific rather than vibes-based. The New York Times published a review praising the game’s portrayal of Manhattan and its potential for exploration, while arguing there is a disconnect between gameplay and storytelling — story and character development are bound to cutscenes and flashbacks with what it called stiff, unnatural performances, with the gameplay mostly focused on combat. The Guardian compared the game’s design to the 2010 film Inception, called movement and exploration the high points, and wrote that the game represents a tonal shift toward easily digestible mainstream convention compared to its predecessor. GamesRadar+’s 3/5 and Giant Bomb’s 4.5/5 round out a picture in which almost nobody disputes the setting, atmosphere, traversal and environmental design — the argument is entirely about whether the melee combat carries the extra hours the RPG structure demands of it.

The players are buying in

If the critical reception is “strong with an asterisk,” the player reception has fewer asterisks. On Steam the game holds a “Very Positive” rating at roughly 88 to 91 percent positive across more than 5,000 user reviews — GamingBolt’s early-October snapshot had 91 percent from 5,209 reviews. On the PlayStation Store it averages 4.8 out of 5 from more than 3,000 player ratings. That is a player consensus tracking the critical one almost exactly: enthusiastic, not unanimous. The standard edition sells for $59.99, with the Digital Deluxe at $69.99.

The PC version has also become a quiet showcase for Remedy’s Northlight engine. It supports NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with full path-traced lighting, Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and RTX Mega Geometry, while AMD hardware gets FSR 4.1 upscaling and frame generation — plus an uncapped framerate, HDR output and ultrawide support. Tatu Aalto, Remedy’s technical director of graphics, has publicly described the path-traced lighting as the visual lift that takes Resonant a generation past the original game. For the settings-tinkerers, Remedy published a six-tier final PC spec guide in September covering raster and ray-traced configurations, all asking for 16 GB of RAM and 120 GB on an SSD.

The window was “challenging” — Remedy’s own word

None of this happened in a vacuum. Communications director Thomas Puha acknowledged before launch that the crowded September was “challenging,” name-checking Silent Hill: Townfall (the same day), Marvel’s Wolverine (September 15) and Onimusha: Way of the Sword (September 4) as the competition. September’s release calendar was genuinely absurd — PlayStation’s own monthly poll listed 28 notable releases, with Resonant and Townfall sharing the 24th. And everyone launching this fall is really launching in the shadow of November 19, when Grand Theft Auto VI arrives and the conversation moves on. Against that backdrop, a mid-80s consensus and a Very Positive player rating looks less like a modest win and more like threading a needle.

Patched since day one

Remedy has not sat still since launch. A release hotfix adjusted the health and stun levels of most enemies — and two of the Resonants players face — and a larger follow-up update brought significant polish across the game while adding New Game++ and quality-of-life improvements, including the ability to view pinned resources at vendors directly from the map. The studio also cut an accolades trailer highlighting the critical praise, set once again to Vilma Jää’s “Manalan Mailla.” What Remedy has not done yet is talk numbers: no sales figures or milestones have been announced, so the commercial side of the story is still unwritten. With the physical edition landing October 15 and New Game++ now live for the devoted, the launch window isn’t really over — it’s just entering the phase where word of mouth takes over from review scores.

For players still on the fence, the practical notes: the full game is $59.99 on the month’s streaming and subscription lineups are worth checking before you buy, October’s MMO launches offer a very different kind of time sink, and if you’ve got a free weekend, tonight is the last night to try ARC Raiders free.

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