Sholva Control Resonant Review

Remedy and Northlight Engine delivering the goods once again. This game is yet another masterwork from Remedy Entertainment, they haven’t disappointed me in more than two decades, and I’m so happy they can continue making the types of games they love to make. Coming from Alan Wake II, which is one of the best looking games this generation, it is no surprise Control Resonant is also packed with quiite scalable Graphics Settings, with plenty of room to tweak to gain some performance back. On my Ryzen 7 5700X with an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, and 32 GB of DDR 4 3600 MTs, I am able to play the game with High Path Tracing and the Ultra Transparency setting (which requires Ray Reconstruction 4.5 and RTX Mega Geometry), at 1440p with just Volumetric Lighting down to High, from Ultra, and the rest of the regular settings all maxed, Quality DLSS 4.5 (the default in this game is Model Preset M) and Multi Frame Generation set at 3x factor, with an output frame-rate between 100 and 120’ish, depending on the situation, with only small dips in the 90s in heavy scenes with lots of particles. It is indeed a heavy GPU game but I am pushing most of the settings with only some minor tweaks. You can tune some extra settings down or lower the DLSS internal resolution even further, the options are there so be used, if you need more FPS, certainly. The Combat has been the most surprising part, in a very positive way, it’s very satisfying and responsive, both with Keyboard and Mouse, and also on Controller. I ended up playing the whole game on Mouse and Keyboard, because it feels very natural, being able to aim the Reach ability to zip around places, or execute enemies with precision, without wasting much time. To be fair, most Remedy games I’ve completed with Mouse and Keyboard so, yeah, works quite well. The game has some of the most insane Set Pieces you’ll ever encounter in any piece of media, not just video games. If you thought the Ashtray Maze from the first Control game was a rare exception and would never happen at a similar degree of wackiness…prepare to be greatly surprised, and to take lots of screenshots (hopefully Photo Mode arrives soon in an update). As per usual, the Soundtrack is quite varied and with some really catchy tracks, and others really digging in deep right into the feels, when it matters. Fantastic job from the sound team on the immense sound engineering job put into the game, as well, the game sounds fantastic, not just the soundtrack, it’s all quite nice, for sure. A lot of care has been put into Secondary Characters and even less important NPC, clearly taking some notes from Alan Wake II, lots of NPCs, quite often in groups, have various chats amongst themselves and, in fact, they even have mini story arcs, as you progress in the game, the same NPCs will have updated dialogues between themselves, just organically having conversations. This was a nice touch and great to see, makes the world feel more believable, what with the NPCs reacting to the moment and what just happened in the story and all. The amazing Motion and Performance Capture we saw in Alan Wake II returns here, with lots of facial detail and animation even from these secondary characters, fantastic to see them feel alive when they talk. With all that said, yeah, I’ve have an incredible experience with this game, it’s a proper Remedy game, in all sense of the word, and should a firm contender to GOTY, it is a very good game, whether you like other Remedy games or not but…if you do like their games, this game is such a treat for us Remedy fans, it’s just incredible.