Remedy has spent two decades building a very specific kind of game: the kind where a malevolent refrigerator is a credible antagonist. That reputation is the weight Control Resonant has to carry from its first frame, and it only partly manages the load. The original Control worked because it never left its own mythology. The Oldest House — a brutalist federal building that folded space, contradicted physics, and housed departments dedicated to cataloguing the paranormal — was a closed system whose rules you never fully grasped. That productive confusion was the point. Resonant blows the doors open. Dylan Faden, Jesse's brother, wakes from years of containment to find the Oldest House's contents have escaped into downtown Manhattan, and so you follow them there. The problem is not that Manhattan is a bad setting. The problem is that it's everyone's setting. Remedy built the most distinctive indoor space in recent game history and then walked out of it. What remains is genuinely good in places. Dylan's movement is the highlight — triple-jumping across rooftops, then rotating your gravitational axis to sprint up a vertical street folded like a Inception set piece while a bureau handler pumps EDM through your earpiece is the kind of moment Remedy does better than anyone. The shapeshifting weapon — cycling between blade, scythe, and hammer — gives fights a kinetic variety that builds satisfyingly across the runtime. The Resonants themselves, the boss roster scattered across Manhattan in any-order hunts, are visually inventive in ways the review declines to spoil, and they interact with the broader enemy ecosystem in interesting ways: defeat one, and other enemies shift in strength and behaviour. But the combat never achieves the surgical precision the genre can deliver. Against something like the swordplay in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the fighting here reads blunt — capable and upgradeable but rarely elegant. And the story has made a deliberate tonal shift that costs more than it gains. Where Jesse's journey felt like a Twilight Zone marathon authored by a government bureaucracy that had gone quietly insane, Dylan's arc is a redemption narrative with moments of human warmth. That's not inherently lesser, but it's conventional in ways the original refused to be. The recondite, oppressive atmosphere of Control — the sense that reality itself had been misclassified — is mostly absent. The free-form structure is a real strength. Main missions run on rails; everything else is yours in whatever order you want, and the Manhattan sandbox accommodates that flexibility better than a more linear design would. The game earns its open layout in the movement sequences even if it doesn't always earn it in the storytelling. The little moments — the folded car park, the EDM cue, an enemy interaction that recontextualises a fight you thought you understood — are where Resonant remembers what Remedy actually is. The honest summary is a game in productive tension with itself. The mechanics are stronger than the original's in measurable ways; the atmosphere is weaker in ways that are harder to quantify but impossible to miss. Remedy has refined its tools and loosened its grip on the thing that made those tools matter. At £49.99, you're buying a very competent action game from a studio that is capable of something stranger, and the gap between those two things is exactly the size of your disappointment.
