CONTROL Resonant's open world is Remedy doing what it does best: Being weird as hell

This fall, I'm finding myself pulled in a dozen different directions all the time, with the main battle being a three-pronged war between gaming/Rogue, my Masters program/internship, and my family. When going up against that kind of stacked roster, gaming has understandably taken a little bit of a back seat here. All of which to say: I'm not nearly as far through CONTROL Resonant as I'd like to be.

Even so, with just a handful of hours under my belt I feel pretty confident in saying: it's rad as hell.

Much like CONTROL before it, I'm not 100% sold on CONTROL Resonant's combat. Despite being different genres, I have the same, semi-ironic problem with both games: I just don't feel as in control as I'd like to be. Now, I will say that is changing pretty rapidly in CONTROL Resonant, and I feel like the combat is improving much faster with Dylan's action game than Jesse's third-person shooter. I'll also say that finding the right combination of weapon/skills has been my only real gripe with Resonant so far. The rest has been exactly what I was looking for (you know, once we knew we were getting Resonant and not a true follow-up to Remedy's magnum opus, Alan Wake 2).

But with that out of the way, let's back up just a bit here.

Resonant picks up seven years after the original CONTROL. Jesse has been acting as the director of the FBC since then, and Dylan has remained in a coma since his brief stint as the series' big bad. When the game starts, the quarantine in The Oldest House has been broken, Jesse is missing, and Dylan wakes up with a mysterious new weapon implanted in his chest, and the mysterious Board of the FBC up his ass.

When you make it onto the streets of New York, everything has gone to hell. But while the Hiss is an ever-present problem in the city, it's seemingly not responsible for the state of things. Jesse is on the case, the Board is pissed, and it's your job to play middle man between your sister and the interdimensional weirdos yelling at you inside your brain.

That's the setup, but the story itself takes a bit of a back seat/pales in comparison to the world itself. And that's exactly what I'm looking for in my CONTROL game.