CONTROL Resonant Review Roundup — Metacritic 84, Remedy's Riskiest Swing Yet

Summary

CONTROL Resonant launched on September 24, 2026, across PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Remedy Entertainment's sequel to the 2019 cult hit swaps out most of what the original was — a claustrophobic shooter set inside a single supernatural skyscraper — for something more ambitious and more divisive: an open-world melee action game spread across a reality-warped version of Manhattan.

The aggregate verdict, based on 97 critic reviews: PS5 at 84, PC at 83, and Xbox Series X|S at 81 on Metacritic. OpenCritic landed at 84–85 with roughly 84% of critics recommending the game. That places the sequel two points above the original Control's 82, but the spread between best and worst scores is unusually wide for a high-profile release.

Sources: Metacritic · The Verge Review · Steam Store · Remedy Official

At a Glance

Review Score Breakdown

The wide spread — GameSpot at 9, ComicBook.com at 2 on the same scale — tells a consistent story: critics who engaged with Resonant's melee rhythm and spatial traversal loved it; those who found the combat loop repetitive or ran the PC version at a rough framerate did not.

What Changed From the Original

The 2019 original put players in the shoes of Jesse Faden navigating the brutalist corridors of the Oldest House — the Federal Bureau of Control's impossible Washington D.C. headquarters — with telekinesis and a service weapon that could transform between a few fire modes. Resonant keeps the fictional universe but changes almost everything else.

Remedy's director cited Sekiro as a reference point for how movement can make traversal feel kinetic, though emphasized that Resonant avoids Sekiro's defensive parry philosophy entirely in favor of offense-first design.

The Aberrant Weapon System

The shapeshifting melee weapon the Aberrant is Resonant's mechanical centerpiece. Dylan can equip different forms to three combo slots — primary, secondary, and finisher — and the weapon visibly transforms mid-combo as you chain attacks.

Base forms:

The deeper build system lets players construct loadouts around these forms, their paranatural abilities, and the enemy types in each zone. Reviewers who found this deep praised it as one of the most inventive melee systems in recent action games. Those who found it shallow noted that the combat can feel repetitive against the game's large roster of flying enemies.

Open Manhattan and Movement

The open world is built from multiple city zones, each warped by the Hiss, Mold, and a new force called Resonance. Buildings bend at impossible angles; entire districts have lost consistent gravity. New traversal abilities unlock through vault missions scattered across each zone — a Metroidvania gating structure applied to an open world.

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"Video games have given us plenty of ways to traverse huge open worlds, but none have felt quite as oddly exhilarating as manipulating gravity in Control Resonant's twisted version of New York City." — Andrew Webster, The Verge

The traversal design is where the game draws its strongest universal praise. Even critics who were ambivalent about the combat cited flying, wall-running, and grappling across a geometrically impossible Manhattan as a consistent highlight.

Storytelling and World-Building

Resonant continues Remedy's Metaverse approach to storytelling: a main campaign told through cutscenes and radio dialogue between Dylan and his FBC handler Zoe, layered over hundreds of audio logs, documents, and in-world instructional videos. The story begins simple and becomes genuinely strange. The mission to find missing director Jesse Faden drives the main plot; the return of Dr. Casper Darling — the FBC's eccentric lead researcher last seen trapped in the Dark Place in Alan Wake 2 — is the detail most fans flagged before launch.

The game is designed to be playable without prior Control experience, but returning players will find substantially more context for the fiction.

Official Trailer

CONTROL Resonant — Altered State Trailer. Released August 25, 2026, via Remedy Entertainment's official YouTube channel.

PC Performance Controversy

The PC version's Metacritic score trailing PS5 by a point (83 vs. 84) reflects real concerns raised in PC-focused coverage. Multiple outlets flagged frame drops and stability issues on configurations above the recommended spec, an unusual situation that Remedy acknowledged was being tracked post-launch.

This is the same issue that pre-release reporting flagged when Remedy published the PC specifications in June. The conversation at the time centered on storage requirements; the post-launch conversation is about optimization at higher graphical settings.

The Xbox Series X|S version trailing by three points (81 vs. PS5's 84) is a larger gap. This continues a pattern that has appeared consistently across multiplatform releases this console generation, where PlayStation versions have polled higher in aggregate reviews.

AI Policy and Collectible

Remedy confirmed well before launch that Resonant was developed without generative AI. On launch day, players discovered an in-game collectible that explicitly calls out "AI slop" in the content industry — a pointed statement given the week's broader context: Level 5 had published an apology on September 24 over the use of generative AI in its promotional materials.

The collectible landed the same day an interim Remedy CEO comment about "varied interest" in AI development efficiency surfaced in gaming press, producing an irony several outlets pointed out. Remedy has not reconciled the two positions publicly.

Editions and What's in Them

Community Reaction

The loudest conversation in Western gaming communities this week is about PC optimization. Reddit threads on r/pcgaming and r/gaming tracked frame-rate reports across GPU configurations, and early user reviews on Steam reflected the same frustration as critic reviews.

Among Control series fans, sentiment is more positive. The broader Remedy community praised the tonal consistency — the game's industrial sound design, the cinematic title sequences, and the volume of supplementary lore material — as proof the studio retained what made the original distinctive.

The AI collectible generated its own thread, landing differently depending on who read it. Some praised Remedy for being unambiguous. Others pointed to the CEO comments as evidence that the studio's actual position is more complicated.

GamePeak Take

CONTROL Resonant is a bigger bet than 2019's original in almost every dimension. The studio that made one of the most original games of that generation decided that for the sequel, the answer was more: more world, more movement options, more systemic depth, more ambition. A Metacritic 84 on PS5 is a solid return on that bet — not a runaway success, but proof that Remedy's vision didn't collapse under its own weight.

The PC story isn't finished. Remedy has historically patched aggressively after launch (Alan Wake 2 shipped in rough shape and was substantially improved within a few weeks). Buying on PC now means accepting that the current state isn't the final state. Buying on PS5 means getting the most polished version of a game that, at its best, does things no other open-world action game is doing.

For players who bounced off the original Control — or who found its corridor-heavy structure claustrophobic — Resonant's open Manhattan is a genuinely different game. Whether that difference is an improvement depends on how much you value navigating space versus navigating narrative. Remedy's answer is both, and it mostly works.