I first played Control Resonant during a demo at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, and it was easily one of the highlights of the event for me. Now, after checking out the first few hours with the full game, my initial enthusiasm has only grown. This is a substantially different experience from the original Control, but it still feels unmistakably like a Remedy game.

The broader critical reception has been similarly enthusiastic so far. At the time of writing, Metacritic sits at an 84 aggregate score after 60 critic reviews, with OpenCritic, funnily enough, at the exact same top critic average. This puts it slightly above the original Control and slightly below Alan Wake II so far.

With Control Resonant, one of the biggest changes is the shift from Jesse Faden to her brother Dylan. He initially struck me as a risky choice for a protagonist. Jesse’s confidence and curiosity made her an effective guide through the Oldest House, while Dylan was defined largely by his trauma and captivity. Resonant uses that history as its starting point, presenting someone who is powerful but damaged, uncertain of his place in the world, and still struggling to reclaim his identity.

Dylan does not make as immediate an impression as Jesse, and the story takes some time to establish its direction. The opening hours are dense, occasionally slow, and filled with terminology that will feel more natural to returning players than newcomers. Still, I’m already warming to Dylan. His relationship with Jesse gives the story an emotional foundation beneath all the cosmic horror, extradimensional bureaucracy, and reality-warping chaos.

Combat provides a much more immediate payoff. Control Resonant is structured as an action RPG rather than a direct continuation of the original game’s third-person shooting. Dylan fights primarily with Aberrant, a shapeshifting melee weapon that can adopt several forms, while combining those attacks with familiar-looking paranatural abilities.

Replacing the Service Weapon with melee combat could have stripped away some of Control’s identity, but Remedy has successfully preserved its sense of force and spectacle. Dylan can launch himself into groups, smash enemies with heavy attacks, manipulate objects, and rapidly move between targets. Encounters reward aggression, particularly because defeated enemies release energy that restores health. The result is a combat system that feels best when I stop playing cautiously and commit to maintaining momentum.

There seems to be a lot of depth waiting to be uncovered as well, with numerous interconnected upgrades and statistics to consider before I have fully understood how often certain abilities will matter. I expect that complexity to become more satisfying as additional options open, but the early presentation could be clearer.

Shifting to a more open, scattered, and mostly outdoors setting is a big shake-up as well. The Oldest House was a brilliant setting in the previous game precisely because of its confinement: an unknowable structure hidden inside an ordinary city. Resonant takes Remedy’s shifting architecture outside and allows entire sections of New York to bend, fracture, and reorganize themselves.

That larger structure has not diluted the studio’s environmental creativity. Some spaces offer considerable freedom to explore, but the game still funnels Dylan into carefully constructed interiors, strange side stories, and dramatic reality shifts. Manhattan feels expansive without immediately becoming another open-world checklist, thankfully.

The studio's internal Northlight Engine remains central to the experience. We previously covered how Remedy intended to use the engine’s latest rendering technology to create more detailed geometry, richer materials, improved ray tracing, and neural rendering features. Those advances are visible in the extraordinary density of Manhattan, the physical destruction produced during combat, and the way lighting transforms spaces as reality shifts around Dylan. Everything looks and runs great on PS5 Pro.

All that being said, it's not flawless so far. The opening is slower than the combat and trailers might suggest; some of the RPG systems feel needlessly opaque; and I have already encountered activities that are less memorable than the game’s authored set pieces. The broader structure also risks repetition if later districts cannot continue introducing meaningful new threats and traversal ideas.

Those are concerns rather than conclusions. I have only played the opening hours, and Control Resonant clearly intends to unfold over a much larger adventure, which does seem to be resonating well for folks who have finished the game already.

What I can say is that Remedy has not made the safe sequel. It has changed protagonists, abandoned the original game’s central weapon, expanded its world, and pushed the series toward a more elaborate action-RPG structure.

That gamble is already producing some of the most exciting combat and environmental design Remedy has created. If the progression, enemy variety, and narrative can sustain the promise of these opening hours, Control Resonant may prove to be much more than a bigger Control. It could be one of the studio’s most ambitious games yet.

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