Control Ultimate Edition

My first few hours with Control felt like someone handed me a David Lynch film and told me to find the save points. Jesse Faden walks into the brutalist Federal Bureau of Control headquarters, the Oldest House, looking for her missing brother, and within minutes she is wielding the Service Weapon and being appointed Director of a government agency she has never heard of. The game gives you almost nothing up front. Lore lives in audio logs, heavily redacted documents, and live-action training videos starring the gloriously eccentric Dr. Darling. If reading collectibles is your idea of optional busywork, you will bounce off this hard. If you find that stuff genuinely compelling, you will be hooked for the whole run. The combat is the game's most divisive element, and honestly the criticism is fair in some places. Jesse's Service Weapon morphs between forms, covering archetypes like a pistol, a shotgun, and a grenade launcher, but those forms are not what makes fights interesting. The psychic abilities are. Telekinesis lets you hurl chunks of concrete at enemies across fully destructible arenas, levitation keeps you mobile above the chaos, and the energy system forces you to keep shifting between gunplay and powers rather than spamming one option. The result is a combat loop that feels physically satisfying in a way few third-person games pull off. The downside is that enemy variety is limited, boss encounters are underwhelming, and side missions can tip into repetitive fetch-quest territory. The Hiss are effective atmosphere but thin antagonists. The map is also notoriously bad, a flat top-down diagram that struggles to communicate the multi-floor, Metroidvania-style layout of the Oldest House. The Ultimate Edition includes both post-launch expansions, which push the package closer to essential territory. The Foundation sends Jesse into cavernous underground sections of the Oldest House with two new powers, Create and Fracture, built around growing and smashing crystal formations. It is a visual contrast to the oppressive office brutalism of the main game and adds meaningful traversal options. The AWE expansion ties Control directly into the Alan Wake universe, introduces light-and-shadow combat mechanics, and is the reason Remedy fans playing across both franchises should start here. Neither expansion reinvents the combat, but both add content that matches the main game's quality rather than padding it. Technically, the game remains one of the stronger showcases for ray tracing on PC. Shadows and global illumination respond dynamically, environments are almost fully destructible, and being caught in a firefight produces a genuinely chaotic spectacle of flying debris, shattered concrete, and redirected projectiles. The HDR support helps too. The game is Steam Deck Verified, which is worth knowing if you want a portable option. The presentation is strong enough that players willing to run with ray tracing enabled will get some impressive visual moments even by current standards. Control Ultimate Edition is the right way to play this one. The base game alone left some story threads dangling in ways that frustrated players at launch, and the AWE expansion in particular brings meaningful closure to threads that stretch across Remedy's broader connected universe. If you go in expecting a tightly paced shooter with clear objectives, you will be frustrated. If you go in curious about what is behind the next locked door in a building that should not exist, the Oldest House is hard to leave.

Alex · Scout Team

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