Putting Control Down For a Bit

I hate writing this. It makes me feel ashamed of myself.

But if there’s anything this bloggy thingamabob has shown me, it’s that posting stuff that paints me as Below Average is par for the course.

So I’ve been playing Remedy Entertainment’s Control for a bit, and after some immense struggles, I’m going to put it on the shelf.

That’s right.

I’m giving up on it for now.

There are several factors that have made me decide to stop playing Control, and you should all know that I’m embarrassed and frustrated by all of them. And it was only after an explosive outburst with the boyfriend that I realized I really should not play something that puts me in such a negative headspace.

So here we go…

1. Performance Issues

This is easily the most understandable and swallowable (in terms of my pride) reason to put a game down. Control is not the most demanding game I’ve ever played, but holy hell, it is just not playing as it should on my Xbox One S.

Side note: I really should get a Series X. I just have to, you know, find a store that has one available.

When you play as Jesse Faden, you have some pretty cool super powers at your disposal. You can fly, grab chunks from the wall, and hurl them at people with your telekinesis. And no part of the environment is safe from this. I can point at a random wall and Launch portions of it at enemies.

But see, when I do that, everything on my screen slows down. It lags to the umpteenth degree. And the game suffers from an uncommon amount of blurriness during combat sequences.

There’s a voice in my head that berates me for leaving Control for this reason anyway, saying that I stuck through all of Ori and the Will of the Wisps’ issues. Why not fight my way through Control?

2. The Guns Are No Fun

Actually, that’s a lie. The different gun types in Control are all awesome.

But apparently, their damage output is nothing compared to your Launch ability.

Over time, I’ve learned that to do any real damage to enemies, using Launch to telekinetically toss shit at people is the most efficient way of dealing with combat.

And it’s like, why give me all these cool Service Weapons to use if the game seems geared toward ignoring them?

The voice in my head just scoffs and says this is a baby-poo-poo reason to give up.

3. I’m an Utter Failure When It Comes To Launching Things

To Launch an object at someone, you have to look at it, press a button, have whatever it is zoom toward Jesse Faden’s hand, and then release the button to have her throw it.

During boss encounters, I just couldn’t tell whether or not I was highlighting and grabbing the projectiles they chucked my way to use against them. So I’d hold the button to grab onto it, wait for it to zoom to Jesse’s hand, and then be dismayed when it turned out I hadn’t grabbed onto the projectile, it was just making its destined beeline toward me and eliminating all of my health.

And using Launch, as I’ve stated before, just demolishes the frame rate of the game.

The voice in my head just tells me to git gud.

4. Interrupting Side Missions

I love doing side missions in games. They’re fun. Red Dead Redemption kept me so distracted, I ignored the main storyline for far longer than I should have.

I hate the side missions in Control. The main story in Control is actually riveting, but these occasional alerts will crop up that completely halt the flow of the gameplay.

And what’s even worse, the first time an alert showed up and I went to go tackle it, I died almost instantly and that was it. No opportunity to do it again. It disappeared from my mission log entirely.

These alerts are just combat scenarios you’re supposed to take on within a set amount of time with almost no relation to the story.

The voice in my head is telling me I’m a wuss puss.

5. I Don’t Know How It Wants Me To Play

Normally when I play a game, I learn fairly quickly what playstyle the game wants me to adopt. When I first played Doom (2016), I learned early on that moving was key to survival. Whenever I got placed in combat, I knew I was supposed to run around the arenas while shooting demons because doing otherwise was death. Movement was key.

In any Gears of War game, I knew that taking cover was a vital aspect of gameplay.

In Risk of Rain 2, I learned that balancing my items was important for later stages down the road.

I don’t know what the fuck Control wants from me.

At first I thought it would want me to take cover, especially given how squishy Jesse’s health bar is. But two things make that blatantly untrue. For one thing, Jesse is given a lot of mobility powers, which indicates that the game wants you to use them. For another, enemies drop little health beads when they’re downed, and you have to run over them to collect them. That means if Jesse gets hurt, it behooves her to get closer to foes.

But when I tried rushing into rooms and diving into combat, I was quickly overwhelmed by enemies I didn’t even see. I would get surrounded and annihilated.

The voice in my head is asking me if I’m just stupid.

6. It’s Too Easy To Die and So Hard To Get Back

I bet Soulsborne fans are rolling their eyes at this one. Yeah, I’m being a major whiner right now. You can mock me in the comments.

When Jesse gets hit, her health takes a nosedive. And it’s hard to recover that health aside from killing a few enemies and rushing at their corpses to try to pick up that health confetti they drop.

And when you die, you have to sit through one long-ass loading screen before the game deposits you at your last save point (called a Control point). These Control points are often not even close to where you died.

Side note: Huh, this really is sounding like a Soulsborne game.

So if there’s a boss fight that is giving you trouble, and the Control point preceding it is far away, expect to make the arduous jog to that fight multiple times, complete with an annoying loading screen. This can get especially irksome if, let’s say, the boss fight takes place over a giant chasm, and in your eagerness to start the fight again you time your flight over it a little poorly, and that one fall sets you back to the beginning before you even had a chance to ineffectually Launch something at the boss.

The voice in my head isn’t saying anything so much as he’s just staring at me in judgment.

So there you have it. I’m putting Control down.

And I’m feeling utterly humiliated by that fact.