Beat the game yesterday. Definitely enjoyed it overall. I always love games that encourage exploration, especially those that lay out a mystery at the start of the story. Definitely made me excited to uncover all the lore I could find in terms of the collectibles. The game does a great job of creating this creepy atmosphere that permeates throughout The Oldest House. I also liked how the game doesn't have a waypoint marker telling you exactly where to go (instead just showing a general direction on the map), as I enjoyed organically exploring the world, and it was neat to rely on things like reading signs in the building to figure out where I needed to go. It's a nice touch to the immersion.
At the same time, I do wish the map was a bit more fleshed out in the game. Coming from the RE2 Remake, it was such a smart system in that game to clearly tell you which parts of the map had items/collectibles still left to find, and marking locked doors to make it easier to know where to come back later. It would have been nice in Control if there was an easier way to track uncollected documents, considering how much of that stuff really made the game for me.
I think the gameplay is really fun overall, and using the powers together along with the service weapon really does feel awesome when everything is clicking. I always had a blast launching things at enemy. I did have some frustrations with certain combat encounters though. Even with all my abilities upgraded, Jesse often felt like a 'glass cannon' to me, and one inadvertent mistake in an encounter (particularly boss battles) could wipe out a huge chunk of health. This isn't necessarily a bad thing on its own, but with the game's decision on handling checkpointing through reloading from the last control point on death, it can get a bit frustrating to die, then have to travel all the back from a control point to restart that encounter from the beginning. Admittedly this system isn't too different from something like Lamps in Bloodborne, but I felt it worked better there because you'd uncover shortcuts to quickly get back to a boss or where you last died. Maybe there were more shortcuts to traverse the map in Control that I missed.
Along with that, I felt boss encounters were the weakest part of the game, though to be fair, most of them are behind optional missions. I just never felt satisfied when I beat them (in the way I would in a game like Bloodborne) and they always felt more like a 'means to and end' for me. I really disliked Quantum Break's final boss, so I was genuinely relieved this game didn't really have one. So there's that at least. .
But overall, I had a really good time with the game. Without diving into spoiler, I felt the ending left me with a lot of questions, and hopefully the upcoming DLC will provide some more answers.
