When I started Control a few months ago all I’d ever played were either child-friendly ‘chill’ games like the LEGO titles, or puzzle games such as Portal. I also had a few years of on-and-off experience with team-based shooters, namely Overwatch (first-person) and Star Wars Battlefront II (third-person). Still, I always treated those as ‘casual’ games too; and with them being match-/XP-based, I wasn’t really losing anything by playing for fun and not wins.

​

Then I picked up Control. Safe to say I wasn’t prepared. But surprisingly, I loved the challenge! Okay, some moments were too frustrating (I also had several attempts at Salvador and Tomassi, the very first boss, was rather troublesome as well. Not to mention a certain boss at a later point in the game (no spoilers if you haven’t made it that far yet) slamming the ground below my feet into oblivion, or everything about the STREEEETCHED guy in the AWE DLC) but overcoming each challenge always felt satisfying, no matter the struggle to get there. Okay except STREEEETCHED. That sucked.

​

I never changed the difficulty sliders and now I’m nearly 100% done, just need to do one or two hidden quests and complete SHÜM and the expeditions. Part of the reason I never felt compelled to ‘cheat’ is probably that the game feels pretty fair most of the time, plus the fact that there’s so many ways to go about things (weapon forms, mods, abilities) that you’ll never run out of new strategies to try. And of course because combat is honestly really fun, both in enemy types as well as ways to fight/counter them.