Is Control Resonant Worth It? Critics vs Players

Evidence-based review · scores read on 27 September 2026. This is a synthesis of published criticism and Steam player reviews, not a hands-on review: AFK Journal has not played the game, and every claim below links to its source.

Control Resonant is a great action RPG that critics and players rate almost the same way, which is rarer than it should be. Critics average 84 on OpenCritic, Steam players sit at 88% positive across 5,545 reviews, and our score is 8.5 out of 10: Great.

The score blends the OpenCritic Top Critic Average (70%) with Steam's share of positive reviews (30%), the same formula we use for every review, and the calculation is shown below. Developed and published by Remedy Entertainment, the sequel to 2019's Control launched on 24 September 2026 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and costs $59.99 on Steam. It swaps Jesse Faden's gun for her brother Dylan's shape-shifting melee weapon, and the Oldest House for a Manhattan folded in on itself.

What do critics agree on?

The world. Remedy's altered Manhattan is the most praised thing in the game. IGN calls the gravity-shifting zones, where streets shoot upwards and you fall between planes, a marvel of level design. GameSpot singles out the art direction and reality-bending environments, and even PC Gamer, one of the cooler reviews, says it kept returning for the privilege of existing in a city that feels hand-crafted rather than perfunctory.

Dylan and the writing. IGN describes one of Remedy's most conventional stories, but with some of the studio's best twists; PC Gamer praises a voice cast that sounds believably exhausted after seven years of lockdown, and calls Dylan an excellent lens on the Bureau's history of experiments. GameSpot highlights an emotionally resonant arc for him.

A sound combat foundation. The Aberrant changes form (sword, scythe, hammer, drill and more) depending on the combo you use, and skill trees let you shape builds. IGN compares the responsiveness to Devil May Cry and Bayonetta; Tom's Guide calls the melee smooth and visceral and says this is Remedy's hardest game yet. Even Eurogamer, the harshest major review, says the game looks good, period.

Where do critics split?

On the combat, and on what an open world does to Control. Eurogamer gave it 3/5, arguing that leaving the Oldest House costs the series its focus and suspense, that the combat has not really improved, and that world events and a chore board feel like the most deadening parts of an MMO. It does single out the Underpass, beneath the Oldest House, as the point where the writing snaps back into shape.

PC Gamer (76) makes a narrower case: basic attacks lack punch, damage only lands once you stack buffs by executing weaker enemies, auto-targeting throws abilities at the wrong target, and enemy level scaling pushed it back into fights it had skipped. It recommends turning up damage in the difficulty settings earlier than it did. IGN (8/10) likes the combat but calls roughly half the bosses spongy slogs. GameSpot (9/10) is the most enthusiastic of the major outlets, with map navigation in later areas its main complaint.

One thing matters when reading these: the reviews went live on 18 September, before the game changed. On launch day Remedy shipped hotfix 1.3.3, which lowers the base health and stun threshold of most enemies and two bosses, raises Dylan's maximum weapon and ability strength, and makes respeccing cheaper. It targets exactly the tankiness IGN and PC Gamer describe, so part of that criticism may already be out of date.

What do Steam players say?

Players like it slightly more than critics do. At 09:08 UTC on 27 September, Steam showed 4,907 positive and 638 negative reviews across all languages: 88.5%, rated Very Positive. English-language reviews reach 90% (3,097 of 3,434), Simplified Chinese reviews 77%. The daily share has been steady, between 87% and 89% each day from 24 to 27 September, and Steam's API counted 25,616 people playing on a Sunday morning in Europe. Steam's rating already excludes review bombs it judges off-topic.

To see what drives the complaints, we ran a keyword count on the 337 most recent negative English reviews and 500 recent positive ones from Steam's public review API. It is a crude text match, not sentiment analysis. Combat comes up in 44% of negative reviews (and 24% of positive ones), bosses in 18%, and open-world side content or repetition in another 18%. Performance terms such as fps, stutter or optimisation appear in 23% of negatives against 7% of positives, crashes in 9%, and camera or targeting in 7%.

In other words, the players who dislike it mostly echo PC Gamer and Eurogamer rather than raise new problems. One caveat: the median playtime at the time of review was 2.3 hours for negative reviews and 7.9 hours for positive ones, so many thumbs-down verdicts come from the opening hours, where both critics and Remedy say enemies felt too tanky.

How does it run on PC and consoles?

Well, on the evidence available. Steam lists a GTX 1070 or RX 5600 XT with 16GB of RAM as the minimum, an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT as recommended, and 120GB on an SSD. DSOGaming's benchmarks found the game GPU-bound, above 60fps at 1080p Ultra on most of its cards without ray tracing, and free of major stutter in the areas tested. Path tracing is the expensive part: an RTX 5080 managed 20 to 22fps at native 4K, and 52 to 57fps with DLSS 4.5 Performance. The game supports DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4 but not XeSS.

GameSpot reported no technical problems across 45 hours on an RTX 4070. Still, 23% of negative Steam reviews mention performance, and several of the ones we read describe low frame rates on laptops or older cards. On PS5 Pro, Tom's Guide describes three modes: Performance at 60fps, Quality at 30fps with full visual fidelity, and a Balanced mode at 40fps with full ray tracing. PC Gamer lists the game as unverified on Steam Deck. Console players have no equivalent of Steam's user score, so this review cannot measure their opinion directly.

How we got to 8.5

The critic half is OpenCritic's Top Critic Average divided by ten; the player half is Steam's percentage of positive reviews across all languages, divided by ten, which we use in full for a game's first 60 days. Critics carry 70% of the weight and players 30%, exactly as in our Silent Hill: Townfall review. We may adjust the result by up to half a point for problems documented by at least two independent sources. The formula matters most when the two sides disagree, as they do sharply over EA Sports FC 27.

We did not apply an adjustment. The damage-sponge complaint is well documented, but it is already inside both halves of the score and Remedy's hotfix has already reduced enemy health; the PC performance complaints come from players, while the one independent benchmark we found reports smooth play. We will re-read the numbers after the New Game++ update and at 30 days.

Should you buy Control Resonant?

• Buy it if you want to explore a strange, hand-built city and follow a character-driven story. This is what most of the reviews we read praise most.
• Buy it and tune it if you like character action but hate grinding. Assist Mode's sliders adjust damage, enemy aggression and more, and PC Gamer advises using them.
• Wait if you want the finished package: Remedy plans an endless New Game++ in October and a Photo Mode in November, and has not announced a story expansion.
• Skip it if you loved the first game for its tight, single-building mystery. Eurogamer's review is the best guide to what the move to an open city costs.

If the combat is the draw, reviewers keep reaching for the same comparisons: Devil May Cry 5 and Bayonetta for the melee, Gravity Rush and NieR: Automata for the movement. Everything we publish on the game will live on the Control Resonant hub, and if you are deciding what else to play this autumn, our list of October 2026 release dates covers the next wave.