Control Resonant gets tough, but gives you the tools to deal with it

Control Resonant isn’t an easy game. At any given moment while exploring vast open areas where you’re sometimes leaping from wall to wall to ceiling, you may be surrounded by swarms of otherworldly enemies trying to crush you into the ground. It can be a lot, especially when enemies sometimes take a long time to take down. I died often. But whenever I got to a point where I was starting to feel frustrated, I didn’t have to suffer for too long; thanks to Resonant’s generous assist mode, I often tweaked the game’s settings to give me an edge so that I could keep on trucking through the game’s weird world.

The assist mode is accessible from Control Resonant’s pause menu. You can tweak things like how much damage you give and take or how generous of a window you have for pulling off dodges, and you can even give yourself immortality or the ability to pull off one-hit kills. There are also a few presets that are a bit like traditional difficulty options if you don’t want to get too deep into messing with the sliders. While the game encourages you to try playing with assist mode disabled, there’s no penalty to flipping it on, and you don’t even need to reload your game if you do so.

Image: Remedy Entertainment

I started using assist mode quite early. Initially, you don’t have many combat abilities or passive skills to make fighting easier, and I was regularly getting my clock cleaned. But with a few small adjustments in assist mode, I made myself just a little bit more powerful while not completely removing any challenge, which kept fights engaging at a pace that felt right to me. After a few hours of leveling up, I noticed I was starting to coast, so I turned assist mode off to bring the difficulty back up.

I found myself toggling assist mode in different ways as I played. Resonant throws a lot of bad guys at you, and I sometimes found the combat to be pretty boring. But instead of resigning myself to slogging through frustrating fights that blocked me from seeing the trippy story beats and locations that I love about Remedy games, I’d adjust some assist mode settings, take out the enemies in my way, and move on to the good stuff. This was a particularly good approach for Resonant’s bosses, which are awe-inspiring spectacles but feature giant health bars; I’d usually start a fight with assist mode disabled and incrementally tweak settings in my favor every time I died so that I could still feel the thrill of a fight without completely eliminating the challenge.

Assist mode was also great for more efficiently tackling Resonant’s sprawling maps, which are littered with secrets and quests. In one area, I had to track down a bunch of chunks of weird mold that protagonist Dylan felt compelled to eat. (It’s gross, but it makes sense in context, I promise.) When I first understood the scope of the mission, I wasn’t looking forward to it; I figured the quest waypoints would all be guarded by hordes of enemies that I didn’t really want to deal with. I just wanted to learn about the mold. But by flipping on immortality and one-hit kills, I blasted through the boring fights so that I could more quickly get to the mold and the narrative reveals that followed. When I got to the (satisfyingly stomach-turning) boss at the end of the quest, I turned off my superpowers so I could take it on.

Control Resonant has a little too much bloat; there are too many enemies wandering the maps and too many open-world activities to sort through. The game’s combat isn’t interesting enough, like in a FromSoftware title or Capcom’s recent Onimusha: Way of the Sword, to make suffering feel worth it. It also, like the original Control, suffers from big difficulty spikes. Remedy patched an assist mode into Control after launch, and with Resonant, it’s including one right from the start. The feature let me set my own pace so that I could see the best parts of the game, which is filled with mind-bending set-pieces and twists, on my own terms.

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