Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games announced Control during the PlayStation E3 Press Conference. The game is a third-person shooter with a mix of reality-bending abilities, not entirely unlike Quantum Break. However, players get to utilize physics-based powers to manipulate gravity and environmental entities to help aid them during combat, similar to the old Jedi Knight games or Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
Control is a new IP themed around an organization known as the Bureau of Control. Players assume the role of Jesse Faden, a disturbed individual with a checkered past, who ends up becoming the director of the bureau. Faden has the ability to manipulate space and bend reality, which is what enables players to fight back against an equally deadly force known as the Hiss.
You can see how Jesse and the Hiss do battle against one another, warping reality, destroying the fabric of our known space continuum, and utilizing higher kinetic abilities to take combat to the next level.
The game reminds me a lot of Scanners meets Men In Black meets The Adjustment Bureau, all wrapped up into one.
This was probably one of the rare times where the game starred a female character where it wasn’t plastered all over the screen what a strong, independent woman she is and how she doesn’t need no man. Shocked, I tell you… shocked.
It still doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s still pretty obvious the AAA industry is heavily pushing to get rid of straight, white males at every turn as the lead protagonists. This was probably one of the few times where they just weren’t obnoxious about it, and instead decided to focus more on the game’s concepts and world rather than identity politics.
Now there are some really interesting things present in the trailer… such as the morphing gun, the room with stasis gravity, or the fact that there appears to be some geometrical affectation taking place that turns the rooms and environments into pulsating cubes. It’s some bizarrely cool stuff.
The actual gameplay looks like typical third-person shooter fanfare, and a lot of it appears to be adapted from Quantum Break but fused with some Force-power abilities. For instance, we see Jesse grab and move entities from the environment around to use them as a shield. It’s also possible to throw objects at enemies with physics-based velocity.
The character gets knocked around a lot and I’m really hoping that that stays in the game. When things go boom a lot of times player-characters keep running as if their feet are locked onto the ground with magnets.
The upside is that all of the footage was captured from a real runtime environment running in-engine on PC.
A release date hasn’t been set for Control yet, but it is going to launch at some point in 2019 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
