Is CONTROL Resonant Worth It? Sale, Deluxe and PC Specs

Image: Remedy Entertainment, Steam store screenshot

CONTROL Resonant at a glance

BESTPRICE: Want CONTROL Resonant? Eneba sells a Steam key: Buy on Eneba →

Do you need to play the first Control?

No. You play Dylan Faden, searching a warped, paranatural Manhattan for his missing sister, Jesse Faden, and Remedy's launch post is explicit: "You don't need to have played the original to begin Dylan's story." According to Remedy, close to 50% of players were new to CONTROL, and the game passed one million copies on October 15. Creative director Mikael Kasurinen's launch note sums up the effort in four words: "This took seven years."

Is the combat different enough from the first Control?

Yes, in how it plays. Dylan fights up close with the Aberrant, a weapon the Steam page describes switching between "bone-crunching blows with a two-handed hammer" and "the swift precision of dual-wielded blades". Hits build toward Falter, a stun that sets up an execution, and early fights were tough enough that the day-one hotfix cut enemy health and the hits needed to Falter most enemies. Twenty minutes into his first session, theRadBrad reads the tutorial line "dealing damage builds up the falter meter" and moments later says, "Yo, that was sick. The combat is already amazing."

Whether different means better splits fans of the original. A 34.9-hour reviewer "loved the first control" and thinks the sequel "improved on every aspect from the first one." A 35.4-hour reviewer who also loved Control says the opposite: "Combat gets incredibly boring after a few hours." We think the melee focus is the reason to buy, and the boss fights against named Resonants such as the Artist and the Dancer are where it gets its set pieces. If what you loved in the first game was the Oldest House and its hidden corners, as that second reviewer did, expect a bigger, more physical game.

Image: Remedy Entertainment, Steam store screenshot

Is the open world worth your time?

Only in part, and you cannot skip it entirely. Even happy players flag it. A player with 51.5 hours finds "a lot of the side content feels a little too Ubisoft open world for my taste, but if you stick to the main story, this is a truly unique, fantastic game." Another, at 42.5 hours, lists "fetch quests, repeating mini missions" and still calls the game "incredible".

The catch is levels. Remedy's own patch notes tell players that "if you are below the enemy level, you are going to have a tougher time with combat, so keep doing side quests, explore twisted Manhattan, and level up!" One 10.5-hour negative reviewer describes exactly that trap: reaching main missions "underleveled given side missions and exploration are just tedious". Assist Mode is the way out, since it lets you turn down incoming damage and enemy aggression instead of grinding.

We also read the 10 most recent English negative reviews on Steam, posted November 5 and 6. That is a small sample, not a survey. Two are mainly about performance: a 1.5-hour player who quit over "constant stuttering and cutting out audio during cut scenes", and a 1.4-hour player calling it "unoptimized" on an RTX 5080. The rest are about the game itself, from "The open world does nothing for the game really" (the disappointed Control fan above) to "the lack of guidance and a poor map" and "the writing is so bad" (9.8 hours, from someone who calls the gameplay "amazing, fluid, satisfying").

Our read: for players who stay with it, the sale price looks like good value. The three positive reviewers quoted here each have more than 30 hours on record, well under two dollars an hour. That comes from three people who liked the game, though, and several negative reviewers stopped between half an hour and 2.8 hours in. So the first couple of hours decide it. If the combat clicks by then, play the main story and let Assist Mode ease the damage rather than clearing every map marker. If it has not clicked, the side content will not change your mind.

Can your PC run it?

Steam lists these requirements:

Update 1.4.0, released October 1, added "Several specific performance optimizations, mainly targeting PC minimum and recommended specs", and AMD has an optional driver that fixes "several game crashes". Remedy reports praise for how the game scales across PC hardware, yet the stutter reports above show results vary by machine.

Image: Remedy Entertainment, Steam store screenshot

Standard or Deluxe Edition?

The Deluxe extras are an AWE Mission Outfit, a digital artbook, the soundtrack, an Untapped Artifact (Wallet) and a Starter Resource Bundle. None of that is a mission or an area. If you want them anyway, do not buy the full Digital Deluxe Edition on Steam: it is $69.99 and not part of the sale. The Deluxe Upgrade is $10, or $8 during the sale, so the discounted base game plus the upgrade comes to $55.99, the same as Xbox's discounted Digital Deluxe Edition at the time of writing.

What has changed since launch

New Game+ at launch let you beat the game only once more. That October update added New Game++, with no limit on the number of runs, and trimmed combat in the Unknown Zone area by 10% to 15%. Photo Mode is still missing, and nothing about it had appeared in the Steam news feed by November 7.

Our take

Two kinds of players should hold off. If your PC is closer to the minimum column than the recommended one, wait for more performance patches and for reviews from players on similar hardware; a missed sale costs less than a game that stutters through its cutscenes. If you take a lot of screenshots, Remedy only says it expects "to release Photo Mode sometime in November", so it may land after the discount ends and you would be buying before you can try it. On PS5, where the spec question does not apply, users rate it 4.7 out of 5 on average, according to Remedy. If you end up waiting past the discount, our Steam sale calendar lists the next seasonal sale dates.

Related reading

• Blood of Dawnwalker review: an open-world RPG whose day and night split changes how the same map plays, if you want exploration that carries more weight.
• Valor Mortis review: a harder, first-person melee game built on parries, if the Aberrant fights are what draw you.
• Stellar Blade on Switch 2: another third-person action game, and what its performance trade-offs look like in practice.
• More worth-it verdicts with the same price-first test: Sons of the Forest, Loftia, Mycopunk, Planet Zoo 2 and Brotato: Primal Dread.

How we checked this

Nobody at GameBrief has played CONTROL Resonant for this article. The gameplay details come from Remedy's Steam page and patch notes, Steam user reviews, and the auto-captions of theRadBrad's first playthrough video (Part 1). We also read Remedy's Steam announcements, its October 15 press release and Q3 2026 business review, the Steam, Xbox and GOG store pages, Metacritic, and recent Steam user reviews on November 7, 2026. Prices are US store prices on that date.

References

• CONTROL Resonant on Steam: price, sale end date, requirements, reviews
• CONTROL Resonant Steam news: launch post, hotfix 1.3.3, post-launch plans, update 1.4.0, one million sold, 20% sale
• Remedy press release: one million copies sold (October 15)
• Remedy Business Review January to September 2026 and Q3 2026 investor presentation
• CONTROL Resonant on the Xbox Store: Xbox price, Deluxe contents
• CONTROL Resonant on Metacritic
• CONTROL Resonant on GOG and GamingOnLinux on the GOG release
• Most recent negative Steam reviews in English, read November 7, 2026
• theRadBrad, CONTROL Resonant Walkthrough Part 1: the opening hours, including the first boss