Gamescom 2018: Control lets you go supernatural

At Gamescom 2018, I attended a presentation for Control, the next game by Remedy Entertainment. Control is a third person action/shooter which allows you to use supernatural powers, suite similar to Quantum Break. You play as Jesse, who can transform her primary weapon into different types of guns. In the demo, I saw her use various supernatural abilities from a basic dash to throwing objects at enemies or even forming a shield around herself. She was able to pick up almost every object in the world and use it against opponents.

Combat relies on a combination of third-person shooting and using these special powers, and the demo showcased a lot of variety. You can approach the sequence in many different ways, depending upon the powers you want to use. You can unlock new abilities by finding objects of power that the Federal Bureau of Control is tasked with collecting and studying. Here I saw her gain the ability to levitate which will affect her fighting skills but also let her access previously inaccessible areas. You can unlock secret locations making use of new powers, like in a Metroidvania.

There were a lot of strange and mystical occurrences happening all around. In one instance, every time she would pull a level in a different area would magically appear before her, and she had to pull it multiple times to move forward. Side missions were confirmed to be a part of the game, but we ignored the one we came across in the interest of time.

The demo ended with a mini-boss fight. The opponent also had supernatural powers so it was a thrilling and entertaining encounter as both characters were trying to use their own special abilities to take out the other.

Control was also used to show off NVIDIA’s new RTX GPU’s Real Time Ray Tracing capabilities for better lighting and reflections. While the tech Demo certainly looked stunning, getting it to run real-time in-game without performance drops is another thing altogether. But given how all the other live demos for RTX ran fairly well, I see no reason why Control will have any problems as we get closer to launch.

Control looks and plays extremely similar to Quantum Break, and I am not convinced it does enough to differentiate itself from their previous game. But there is an aura of mystery and intrigue around Control, and they have a real opportunity to demonstrate that through the story and gameplay. From what I saw, they are keen on nailing the atmosphere and story-telling, while keeping the combat encounters fresh and exciting. It could work well if I we kept getting new abilities at a regular pace and if the level design gave us the opportunity to try out new powers. So far, Control looks to be a solid game with a promising setting and main character. I am eager to experiment with the supernatural powers and to see how they shape the design of on combat encounters over the course of the game.

By: Parth Bagaria

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