Control Resonant’s combat is a massive departure from the classic Remedy gunfights of the original Control. The shapeshifting gun has been ripped out of your hands and replaced with The Aberrant, a skeleton key of a melee weapon capable of unlocking enemy weaknesses, be that in the form of nifty dual blades or a defence-smashing hammer. With multiple forms to experiment with, numerous abilities to unlock, and an extensive skill tree to explore, The Aberrant represents Control taking one step further into the realm of action RPGs. To learn how it all works, I spoke to the team at Remedy all about Resonant’s new combat system and the weapon that powers it all.
Having now played three or so hours of Control Resonant, I can confirm that whatever form The Aberrant takes, it’s a joy to cleanse Manhattan with. The action is swift, immediate, and packs a punch on every step of its power trip. It hits that glorious balance of looking and feeling great, without ever becoming needlessly complex. Its malleable form fits perfectly around the bloodied fist that is Dylan, our antihero, like a glove scuffed with the concrete you rip up from the world’s streets with each ground-shattering impact. Those who have played any of the Finnish studio’s games will not be surprised to hear that the action is slick, but the fact that its first full swing at melee combat has come together so well is certainly impressive.
But while Resonant marks Remedy’s first foray into melee, it’s been thinking about close-quarters combat for a long time. “When we were working on the first Control game, we already had ideas for making melee combat,” reveals Sergey Mohov, lead gameplay designer on Control Resonant. “Control does have melee, but we actually wanted to make a Service Weapon melee form back in the day. We even had concept art and everything for that.”
Alas, that never came to fruition. Already a new beginning for the studio, the desire to inject melee into Control fell by the wayside due to other ambitions.
“It was important to me that we started to think of [Control] as an RPG experience,” says Mikael Kasurinen, director of both Control games. “With the first game, we wanted to start from a place of familiarity. So we were known for doing third-person shooters. And it felt like that's the right way to start that experiment in a way, like what's the Remedy version of an RPG franchise? So we started to bring in things like side quests, or you can customize your character even further than in any [of our] other games before, and you can actually pick choices and conversations with other characters. They were like new things that we'd never done before.”
One non-negotiable for Control, though, has been placing aggression at the core of combat. Remedy never wants you to hide as you chase down enemies. Rather, you should use the architecture of Resonant’s arenas as parkour pathways to reach them, rather than nooks to take cover in. That’s evident from even just a glance at Resonant’s action, as Dylan dashes, double-jumps, and dives headlong into hordes of glowing red Hiss with reckless abandon, soaking up the blue shards of health that cascade from his victims. Switching to melee feels a natural evolution for the series, and a logical step that builds on the lessons learned through the original’s shooter-centric design.
“What people tended to do when we had the early prototypes [of Control], was they kind of took it as a full-on shooter, hiding behind cover and peeking around and so on,” Kasurinen explains. “But what we wanted to do was make people be more aggressive and use the paranatural powers that they have.
“We did, I think, a pretty good job of bringing in the combination of abilities and shooting,” he continues. “But there was this thinking at the back of my head when we were working on the first Control that, yeah, melee, that would make a lot of sense because there's something about it being intuitive that you want to organically get close to the enemies.”
Enter The Aberrant, an Object of Power gifted to Dylan by his sister Jesse. Your first choice will be to select which of its three primary modes you’ll wield for the story’s opening act. You have the quick-hitting, high-critting dual blades, known as Flurry; the Slice, best used for taking on enemies one-on-one for big damage; and Slash, which is best utilised for crowd control due to its sweeping nature.
Beyond these basic attacks is where the aforementioned RPG aspirations enter the mix. From here, you can construct a version of your chosen weapon (and a version of your Dylan) that best suits your playstyle.
“We have three slots for The Aberrant,” explains Mohov. “We have the primary, the secondary, and the combo ender. Those are different shapes that The Aberrant takes when you press the [corresponding] button. So for instance, you start a combo with dual blades, and then if you continue that combo, you will switch to the combo ender, this cleaving spinning weapon that hits enemies in a big arc.”
There are definitely character action influences to be felt when playing Control Resonant, with some of the enemy juggling and outlandishly stylish abilities conjuring up images of Platinum games of the past. But for those whose tastes are more solidly rooted in Max Payne than Bayonetta, this sequel still very much uses its predecessor as its main inspiration. Part of what made 2019’s Control so enjoyable to play was how powerful it made you feel via relatively simple inputs on the controller. See: tapping a button to launch a two-ton chunk of concrete at an enemy. It’s a sentiment carried over here, with complex button combos neglected in favour of satisfying simplicity, born out of the builds you’ll set up in the menus.
“We want everything to feel immediate,” Mohov states. “You press the button, the thing happens. That's the philosophy of design. You press Square, Dylan does the attack. You press R1, Dylan does the ability. There’s no, ‘I'm switching to the mode of this and then I am pressing another button or holding a modifier key’. We did prototype all of these things and those slowed down the combat quite a lot, and we don't want you thinking about that. We want everything to feel immediate and visceral.”
Further to that philosophy of immediacy is Mohov and the team’s refusal to incorporate a parry into Dylan’s skillset. There is a shield — one formed from levitating rock that I had a glorious time using to bulldoze into groups of enemies and bash them into a stunned state — but no way to turn your foes’ attacks against them. Again, it’s all in the name of momentum and staying on the front foot, a design choice that proves a welcome breath of fresh air in a genre where so many games employ a parry mechanic at their core.
“We did prototype parry and deflect mechanics, and decided to remove them,” Mohov reveals. “The idea behind the combat system of Control Resonant is that offense is the best defense. When we implemented these kinds of defensive mechanics, we noticed that we're waiting for enemies to do something to press the button in return. And that just didn't seem to fit the philosophy that we had for the combat system.”
Resonant is not quite an open world game – it’s made up of multiple expansive city zones. Remedy’s decision to have Control breach the walls of The Oldest House and let its destructively parasitic Hiss loose on the streets of New York opens up a new increased verticality in level design and, as a result, a new approach to encounter design. It may sound counterintuitive for a series transitioning from ranged to melee combat to increase the number of airborne enemies, but that’s exactly what Dylan’s movement abilities allow for.
“He's very nimble and he's very fast and he can also stay airborne for a long amount of time,” says Anne-Marie Grönroos, lead level designer on Control Resonant. “There are a lot more enemy types that can follow Dylan wherever he goes, a lot of flying enemies too, which of course makes it easier to do at these massively epic scale, vertical levels.”
Mohov expands upon the idea behind these expanded player spaces. “When you think about melee games, you'll find (with some exceptions) they are going to be you walking into a combat arena, standing in the middle and enemies are coming to you. Your job is to press the button with the right sequence and they just die one by one and the next enemy comes and then the next enemy comes. That's kind of how those games used to work. We wanted to challenge that a little bit with Resonance.”
“That's a very difficult thing to design because we can't just point to another game and say, okay, we're going to do it like this other game,” Mohov continues. “We had to figure it out. So the player in this game is going to be chasing monsters around, and we wanted that to be fun. That means that they needed to be at different heights. They needed to be of different sizes. Some of them needed to be on walls or on the roof so that you can figure out a little traversal puzzle about how to get there. And of course flying enemies are a big part of that because they have another dimension in which they can navigate. We just noticed that it's really fun to knock them down as well from the height so they fall on the ground and then you can ground slam into them, and everybody dies.”
Movement is a huge part of Control Resonant, with each of Dylan’s key traversal abilities unlocked by completing dungeon-like Fault missions, such as the trippy train-riddled one revealed in the first drop of this month’s IGN First. In that level, I got to play around with “Reach”, Resonant’s equivalent of a grappling hook, and an ability inspired by one action game close to Resonant’s director’s heart.
“I was really captivated early on by Sekiro, and it happened to come out in the same year as we did with the first game,” Kasurinen reveals.
“It did things with movement through the world that I felt were super cool. So it did make me think a bit about like, okay, where do we go from here?” he continues. “I loved the simplicity of it and the straightforward journey that the character had through a very dense world with a lot of layers and stories.”
From my few hours with Control Resonant, the level of depth within its combat alone was clear to see. The same can be said for so much else of the game, too. From its monstrous bosses and shifting world, to the stories and characters that inhabit it, there’s a deep well to sink into here. Much of which we’ll take a dip into later on in this month’s IGN First.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.