Control Resonant trades shooting for a shapeshifting sword because "melee is cool", its creative director tells me, and he's not wrong

As I watch Control Resonant protagonist Dylan Faden warp reality while crushing legions of strangely shaped cosmic horror foes, I can see the same energy as Jesse Faden's controlled chaos from the first game. At the same time, where Jesse used her shapeshifting Service Weapon gun, Dylan gets stuck in with Devil May Cry-like combat, using a transforming weapon of his own – the melee-centric Aberrant.

With the action having moved from one estranged sibling to the other ("Jesse Faden is not playable in Control Resonant," confirms communications director Thomas Puha), both similarities and differences are very much intentional. "Part of the thinking is that these two games stand on their own feet, and they are like expressions of the two different siblings," says Mikael Kasurinen, creative director of Control Resonant and the Control series. "They both have their own way of doing things, but they're each like another side of the coin."

Twin mirror

The Federal Bureau of Control's lockdown is over. The Federal Bureau of Control's lockdown failed. The paranatural entities hostile to humanity – once contained to causing havoc within the sealed, non-Euclidian labyrinthine halls of The Oldest House, FBC HQ – have now ruptured. With the unknowable threats spreading across Manhattan, the island itself has fallen to space-time ripping The Patterning – and it threatens to spread further. Dylan Faden, once considered too dangerous to leave The Oldest House, may now be the only one who can quell the threat. He must defeat resonants, humans twisted into monstrous beings who roam the city, and absorb their power.

Despite the switch from shooting to melee, the last-minute dodges, well-timed violence, and explosive debris during the scraps I've seen Dylan deal with still feels very Control. "This is a sequel, and we spent a lot of time figuring out what it meant to make a Control game," says lead gameplay designer, Sergy Mohov, emphasizing that – yes, this is Control 2 in all but number. "To us, it means being aggressive, being on the move, interplay between weapon attacks and combat abilities."

"I would like to emphasize the aggressive part," says Kasurinen. Remedy has long been known for excellent third-person shooters that leverage creative powers, whether that's the now-iconic bullet time in Max Payne, or the keep-away torchlight of Alan Wake. But it's never really made a cover shooter. "With Control, it was actually a bit of a challenge when it's a shooter, but it's not a cover shooter. We wanted people to leap into the middle of enemies, keep doing things, using abilities, shooting, of course, and so on. It was all about how you navigate these complicated, fluid situations. That's what makes the game fun and makes it tick. You could say it's exactly what we have with Control Resonant as well. I do feel like the DNA is shared in an extensive way."

Puha calls Control Resonant's shift towards action RPG as a genre "a natural progression", and so much of Dylan's adventure feels like a step forward. The Patterning has resulted in Manhattan being split up into zones that have been warped in different ways, making for an "open-ended world" instead of full open world that takes cues from how each floor of the first game's The Oldest House had a distinct feel.

Even so, Manhattan's exterior streets make for wider, bigger spaces – with a much improved map to match ("We tried hard to improve the map over the first game, where we know it was a source of frustration for many," says Kasurinen). Meanwhile, core abilities like Dylan's Shift, allowing him to easily snap between different directions of gravity to match the twisted Manhattan, feel like they'd be at home in Control's The Oldest House. Don't think that tackling a city is going to make environments stale, quite to the contrary. I've seen environments more bizarre than many in the first game thanks to the scope of Manhattan's deformed landscape. Plus, there will be interior locations too – yet to be detailed – including a new panopticon containing dangerous paranatural objects.

The design principles of the first Control remain intact, but the scope of Dylan's mission here means balancing wider spaces with more intimate combat encounters. "There's this kind of epic, monumental feel to the city," says Kasurinen. "But, there's actually something really appropriate about still going with melee, because it's a more organic way for the players to kind of move through the world. They have to go through the enemies, versus shooting them from a distance, which is not necessarily the experience we wanted."

Dylan can take a page out of Jesse Faden's power book, briefly hovering through the air to cover gaps between tall building rooftops. But, he can then snap to the gravity of another building that's been warped perpendicular to him. Enemies on the rooftop attack, and he snaps out a long-distance whip to batter them, before hitting a perfect dodge to buff his stats then smashing more foes with an axe, getting close to hit L3 to transform the Aberrant into twin knives that he can ratata-tat into a Hiss body to finish it off. Then, it's onto the next building. I see one sequence that has Dylan twisting and dodging mid-air through a valley of brick to avoid laser beams from a massive, strange entity as he works his way to a music hall pumping beats, where a boss fight with a resonant 'Dancer' awaits.

Psychic battering

Described as an action RPG, Control Resonant's melee allows you to get as detailed as you'd like, whether that's poring over its very detailed percentage-based stats screen, or simply picking the coolest looking Aberrant weapon forms and going ham. "It's not that hard to look good in combat," laughs Puha.

Dylan's Aberrant is highly customizable, and you can press the d-pad at any time to step into The Gap to tweak your powers to your liking – similar to instantly entering the Mind Palace in Alan Wake 2. At its core, that means picking a primary, secondary, and combo-ender form for the Aberrant, which enables you to create your own personal string of combos, then supplementing those attacks with Resonant Abilities and Talents to create synergies.

Which Resonant Abilities you use are the major divergent choices in playstyle build in Control Resonant, earned by defeating each resonant boss. Almost a bit like using a remembrance in Elden Ring, this doesn't simply give Dylan one ability, but a choice of three.

Remedy shows me two different options for a single reward. The first is a telekinetic shield that swarms debris around Dylan, absorbing damage by chipping away at the resource bar, but that also turns Dylan's dodge into a shield bash that deals blunt and knockback damage. The other is a summon-type Ability, Seekers – glowing entities that fight on your side to shoot out blunt debris damage, but that can also be thrown as an explosive projectile.

Getting to see combat builds based around both, the former has Dylan getting really stuck into the fray, slamming into foes; while the latter build is supplemented by more summons (such as molded turrets), having Dylan run circles around enemies while diving in to dish out big damage when enemies are softened up.

Abilities use a resource shown as a meter at the bottom of the screen, with more power juice gained by using Aberrant attacks and finishers, all while Talents can activate to give buffs that aid in that back and forth. Mohov calls Talents "the glue that ties your combat abilities and melee attacks together". These include the aforementioned Perfect Dodge, but also the likes of Hit and Run, which gives a 25% damage and falter boost to dodge attacks; Back Stab Damage to increase damage from strikes behind enemies by 50%; or simply Extended Dash for a 200% increase in dash duration.

It's easy to imagine a summon-heavy build taking advantage of the distraction to land extra damage on enemies who have their backs turned, or to power-up the Shield Bash attack by souping up those dodges. A big skill tree in the traditional sense, Remedy points out you won't be able to unlock them all, so will have to make decisions – though Talents can also be respecced for a resource cost.

Control Resonant really gives you a lot of room to get into the nitty gritty of Dylan's specific stats and damage numbers, but the basics are intuitive enough to get stuck in without having to worry about every single detail, though Remedy has teased there are more systems to come that have yet to be revealed. One seems to be based around how enemies will respawn in each zone, which Kasurinen calls "a bit more nuanced" than foes simply reappearing.

"There is a system behind the madness," teases Mohov. "We have thought about this, and we also learned a lot of lessons from Control." Like the map, this seems to be a feature that's been iterated and improved, and has me wondering if there may be some kind of world level system to keep players pushing back through zones and dialling up difficulty with a risk-reward aspect, which would suit the style of the map I've seen which has numbers next to zone names. In the first game, respawns could feel a bit random. But that's just speculation on my part, and maybe something of a wishlist item.

Experimentation is at the heart of what Control is, both as a game for people to play, and for Remedy as a studio. It's one of the reasons Control Resonant doesn't have a number two on it. "We don't want it to be a sense of 'Oh, I should go through this back catalog of things before I play this one," says Kasurinen.

"Part of the Control franchise overall is that we don't just follow one character about the world, we have these different lenses into that world." Dylan's journey builds on FBC: Firebreak, which followed everyday FBC agents struggling to maintain The Oldest House's quarantine. "[Control] is not a journey of a single character [...] These are different entry points into the world," he says.

Control Resonant's announcement has caused a lot of 'whats' and 'whys', but that stems from Remedy going, as usual, in its own way. It's an action RPG, but not one with traditional gear or stats. It's not an open world, it's an open-ended world. You no longer play as the hero fans came to love in the first game. Now you use melee instead of shooting. There's a lot of reasons for all of the above, but the simple answer is the best. "Melee is cool. That's one side of it," says Kasurinen. "It's always nice to find something to be invested in. It's an exciting idea for us."

Check out our best Remedy games ranking for what to play next!