As a huge fan of Control, with its blend of stale office rooms punctuated by new weird abstraction and stark angular architecture, I was a little hesitant to play Control Resonant, because it takes things out of the Oldest House and flips the core gameplay from shooter to melee brawler. But Control's appeal is the baseline that sits under everything in this sequel, and I can feel it almost immediately once I start playing, because even though this game’s pushing out of the Oldest House and onto the more open streets of New York, and shifting into up-close Devil May Cry-inspired melee combat, it never really stops feeling like Control.
“Control first, so that’s the world,” says the game’s art director Elmeri Raitanen (who also worked on Alan Wake 2), and then adds something that tells me just as much about how this game is built, “it already rules out many things that it can’t be,” which sounds simple enough, but in practice it means every space, every asset, every bit of this New York is already working inside a fairly strict visual language before it even becomes a level. It means that while I’ve played many games set in New York, I’ve never seen it like this before.
