Control Resonant’s 84 Hides a Fierce Critical Split

Control Resonant has critics throwing furniture across the room while Metacritic sits in the lobby pretending an 84 means everybody agreed.

That 84 covered 56 reviews in a September 18 snapshot, putting Remedy Entertainment’s sequel two points above the original Control’s overall 82. Even that tidy comparison starts leaking immediately. Metacritic keeps separate platform averages, and the 2019 game scored 85 on PC. OpenCritic placed Resonant at 85.

Then you open the reviews. ComicBook gave Resonant 2/5 and hammered its restrictive combos. Vice went all the way to 10/10, praising the collision of melee attacks, levitation, air dashes and telekinetic powers. IGN landed at 8/10 while calling some stretches dull and praising several of Remedy’s biggest swings.

An 84 can hold all those opinions, same as a ranked lobby can hold a zoner, a grappler and somebody picking random. It cannot tell your group whether Resonant improved the series. Three fights are happening inside that score: whether the melee has enough depth, whether Manhattan preserves the Oldest House’s concentrated weirdness, and whether Dylan Faden can carry Jesse’s controller.

The Melee Pivot is Where the Score Starts Wobbling

Control built its action around Jesse’s transforming Service Weapon and telekinetic powers. Resonant gets in your face, giving Dylan an Aberrant weapon with multiple melee forms alongside supernatural abilities. GamesIndustry.biz’s critical survey found praise for the link between movement and fighting, plus criticism that Remedy’s first crack at this combat style felt undercooked.

Critics agree that Dylan has options. They’re scrapping over whether the enemies and encounter design make those options count.

Kotaku’s Cole Kronman argued that players construct routes from primary attacks, secondary attacks and psychokinetic abilities without the elaborate preset strings associated with character-action games. Under that reading, the sauce comes from positioning, improvisation and staying aggressive rather than memorizing a combo dissertation.

GamesRadar’s Oscar Taylor-Kent saw a shallower loop. In his 3/5 review, fights repeatedly became a cycle of closing distance, attacking, dodging and spending powers. Loadout changes happen outside combat, while recurring projectile pressure and limited enemy variety made encounters drag across the longer campaign.

Push Square’s 8/10 review praised weapon combinations, traversal and optional bosses that unlock major abilities, then named repetitive combat and thinning enemy variety as the chief problems.

The melee skeptics have the stronger case for players coming from Devil May Cry, Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden. Multiple positive reviews still identify repetition, bluntness or limited enemy variety. That convergence suggests the concern reaches beyond one critic disliking a genre pivot. Remedy appears to provide build choice without consistently demanding mid-fight adaptation.

That verdict has a boundary. Players who want one preferred loadout, supernatural movement and readable power synergies may find plenty to cook with. Anybody expecting a deep character-action lab should listen closely when critics across the scoring spectrum describe repetition. Do not let the words “action RPG” and “melee-focused” gas up the group chat by themselves.

Remedy Has Been Rebuilding Its Own Sequels for Years

The overhaul fits Remedy’s recent history. Kotaku’s review traces the move from Alan Wake’s arcade-like shooting to Alan Wake 2’s methodical survival horror. Seven years after Control, Remedy has again changed the governing verbs, transforming a third-person shooter with Metroidvania structure into a melee-focused action RPG.

For this studio, continuity can live in unstable spaces, fractured storytelling and recurring characters while the play style gets stripped for parts. That history explains why Resonant feels like a cousin who arrived at the reunion wearing Jesse’s colors and carrying an entirely different fight stick.

The sequel pushes further than swapping guns for blades. Jesse gives way to Dylan. The Hiss escapes the Oldest House into Manhattan. Long-range spatial control becomes close-range pressure. Kronman connects that mechanical change to character: Jesse investigated an unfamiliar institution from a cautious distance, while Dylan, imprisoned and experimented upon, attacks his captors directly.

That reading gives the combat overhaul a narrative purpose. It cannot erase repetitive encounters. Theme explains why Dylan fights this way; encounter design decides whether players still enjoy the 50th brawl.

Dylan creates his own review split. IGN’s Michael Higham, quoted by Polygon, found him compelling as a tragic FBC experiment and a clearer lens on Control’s esoteric world. Dexerto called him a “black hole of charisma” who struggled to fill Jesse’s shoes. Players attached to Jesse should treat her reduced role as a structural change, not a cameo-sized inconvenience.

Manhattan Gains Freedom and Loses Some Pressure

The Oldest House gave Control a ridiculous home-court advantage. Its Brutalist corridors could rearrange themselves, and a homicidal refrigerator belonged inside that paranormal federal maze. Resonant spills the same visual language into an open-zoned Manhattan where streets fold vertically and gravity becomes a traversal mechanic.

The pro-Manhattan critics make the stronger argument here because they identify what the extra space adds to play. Rock Paper Shotgun, quoted in the GamesIndustry.biz survey, praised progression tied to exploring and strengthening zones instead of wallpapering the map with icons. IGN praised environmental guidance that lets the city direct players without waypointing every activity. Push Square found that double jumps, limited flight and gravity shifts turn the skyline into playable geometry across an estimated 25-hour campaign.

The cost still shows. The Guardian’s review called the sequel accomplished but safe, arguing that downtown New York feels more familiar than the Oldest House despite its paranormal contortions. It praised free-form movement and progression while finding the setting and redemption story closer to mainstream action-game convention.

That critique hits hardest at atmosphere. Manhattan gives traversal room to breathe, optional activities somewhere to live and folded architecture enough scale to become a movement puzzle. The Oldest House delivered denser pressure because every office, threshold and possessed appliance reinforced the same institutional nightmare. One space offers more routes; the other carries more menace per square foot.

The Elden Ring Comparison Has a Short Combo Window

Dexerto compared Remedy’s expansion to FromSoftware’s move from Dark Souls to Elden Ring: a series built around tighter spaces enters a nonlinear world and must fill it without diluting its identity. Its review found that world events, Altered Items and side missions fed Dylan’s growth while encouraging vertical exploration.

The parallel explains the spatial gamble. Both studios took an established design language outside and trusted exploration to carry more of the experience.

It stops before the boss fog. Resonant also changes protagonists and rebuilds ranged combat around melee. Remedy flipped the fighter, the arena and the move list together, so no single review can isolate which change produced somebody’s 2/5 or 10/10. That limits any claim that Manhattan alone improved or weakened the sequel.

If your friends are deciding who jumps in, forget the two-point victory lap. Come for impossible architecture, freer traversal and Remedy treating sequel design like a permission slip to get weird. Wait if your must-haves are Devil May Cry-level expression, the Oldest House’s claustrophobic identity or another Jesse-led mystery. The reviews repeat those warnings too often to shrug them off.

Control Resonant may sit above Control in one aggregate snapshot, but the 84 is the calmest object in a room where the fighter, arena and rule set are still flying through the walls.