The Verdict
Control Ultimate Edition is a power fantasy that earns the label. You’re throwing filing cabinets through walls, levitating above chaos, and firing a shape-shifting pistol at shadow monsters inside a brutalist government building. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It does.
The Short Version
Once the game hands you its full toolkit, the combat feels genuinely great. The combination of Jesse’s telekinetic powers and the Service Weapon creates this rhythm where every fight becomes a physics playground. It’s a prestige action title that nails something most games miss: making you feel powerful without making the game feel easy.
What Works (The Highs)
The gunplay and powers combo is the whole game. Launching a desk at a Hiss guard while your weapon reshapes mid-reload is the kind of thing that’s hard to describe and easy to love. It never really gets old.
The power fantasy is genuinely well-tuned. Levitation, Shielding, Launching. All three feel responsive and satisfying to use. Remedy clearly spent serious time on the feel of these abilities, not just the function.
The environmental destruction is legitimately impressive. Every fight tears up the room. Columns crumble, glass shatters, debris becomes ammunition. Battles feel cinematic without trying too hard to be.
The Oldest House keeps you curious. The world is strange in a way that pulls you forward. You want to know what’s around the next brutalist corner, even when the map isn’t helping.
What Doesn’t Work (The Lows)
The opening hours are a slog. This is the real issue. Before you unlock Launch, the game plays like a more generic third-person shooter. The tools that make Control special take too long to arrive, and the early game asks a lot of patience in exchange for a slow trickle of abilities.
The map is genuinely confusing. The verticality of the Oldest House is cool architecturally and annoying navigationally. Getting lost here doesn’t feel like exploration. It feels like the map UI letting you down.
Final Score: 8/10
Control Ultimate Edition is one of the best examples of mechanical satisfaction in the last decade of action games. It loses two points because the beginning takes too long to give you the good stuff. Once you’re airborne and throwing office furniture at federal horrors, it’s a 9. The slow start drags that down to an 8. Still an easy recommendation.
Control Ultimate Edition scores 8/10 on immediate fun. Incredible power-fantasy where gunplay and telekinesis feel fantastic, though it asks for patience at the start.
Slow start.
One question: did it deliver immediate fun? Graphics, story depth, difficulty and critical acclaim are ignored. Pick-up-and-play accessibility is rewarded; anything that makes you wait for the fun to start is penalized.
How we score: We don't care about graphics, story depth, or critical acclaim. One question — did it deliver immediate fun? We reward pick-up-and-play accessibility and penalize anything that makes you wait for the fun to start.