*Spoilers* (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Sunday, September 01, 2019, 09:07 (1908 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I'm just marking this whole post as spoilers, so I don't have to tag individual things.

First, regarding performance: Even on a One X it's not stellar. It's not awful, but there are some noticeable annoyances. FPS drops to the mid 20s or so during the bigger combat encounters. Still totally playable, but its very noticeable. Leaving the regular menu was fine, but if I actually paused the game, the game would stutter for like 5 seconds when I started playing again. I also had issues with the map loading pretty frequently. Video playback was fine if I did it through the collections menu, but it stuttered and had audio sync issues if I was just watching it in the game world off a projector or whatever.

There was one that didn't play at all. It was an audio tape about Polaris. It's just completely blank, both in the world and when I played it through the menu. It was right before I entered the dump, I think.

Now, regarding story and characters. I never actually finished Alan Wake, so I can't compare (I'm looking for a copy, now, though!). I like the story overall more than Quantum Break, but I think a lot of that is just due to setting, world building, and presentation. The actual main story of Control doesn't have a whole lot going on. I think that's okay, though, and I liked where it ended up. I see where you're coming from on the character point. I think Trench and Darling were really interesting even though we never interacted with them. I actually really like the way that was handled. I quite liked Emily Pope. I do think there was opportunity to have some more interesting characters in the mix, but I really like what we got. Ahti was great every time he showed up.

You mentioned cutscenes, and I just have to say I quite like the way they did it. No, there's not a lot of flashy cinematography, but I really think that was a deliberate choice for the presentation, and it worked wonderfully for me. The close ups and Jesse's inner monologue really fit the tone of the game in a great way, in my opinion.

At the end of the day, the gameplay and the atmosphere carried this game and the story did what it needed to do to keep me going. The Oldest House is such a fantastic setting and play space, and there's so much room to grow into a sequel or an expansion if they want to (there's even that call from the Board that explicitly calls out an expansion, so I've got my fingers crossed).

I think my biggest disappointment (if you can really call it that) is the missed opportunities that the setting allows for. The Former fight (The Refrigerator quest that SkilUp spoiled in his video) was really cool and fun, as was The Anchor. esseJ was probably my favorite part of the whole game. It's difficult to make a good combat encounter against what amounts to a player character, but they pulled it wonderfully, I think. I honestly wanted to explore a whole lot more of the mirror world--they could have done some really interesting things, there! I wanted more interesting boss style encounters like esseJ, The Former, The Anchor, etc. I still haven't done the Mold stuff yet, and I haven't gone and faced Tommasi yet. I also still have the quest to find that one guy's squad and to cleanse those objects.

I do also wish there had been at least one section with more of a horror element. They leaned really heavily on weird, and sometimes even creepy, but I wanted one section of the Oldest House to turn into Resident Evil 2 for like an hour.

As I predicted, Control is a game that I just wish was much bigger than it is. I just want to keep exploring The Oldest House and finding weird stuff and cleansing objects.

Oh, I also really loved the Ashtray Maze. That section was amazing. The music was great and really nailed the atmosphere as I rushed through the maze and smoked a bunch of enemies.

I did really enjoy the final sequence, fighting up to Dylan, when the Board supercharges your powers, just one-hitting wave aver wave of enemies with Launch. Was a nice change of pace from the typical final combat sequences in a lot of games.