Control Resonant: Review Scores, Day-One Patch Backlash and What Critics Are Saying
Control Resonant launched September 24 to solid Metacritic scores in the low-to-mid 80s, but a day-one balance patch forced many PC players to redownload the entire 92GB game right before launch. Here's what critics loved, where they disagree, and how Remedy responded.
Remedy Entertainment's Control Resonant launched worldwide on September 24, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and the review verdict is in: a strong, if slightly divisive, follow-up to 2019's Control. Critics are largely praising the game's warped vision of Manhattan and its new protagonist, Dylan Faden, while splitting hard on the melee-first combat overhaul. Launch week also brought a rockier moment than Remedy would have liked, after a day-one patch triggered a platform quirk that forced many PC players to redownload the entire game just before they could play it.
Here is what the review scores actually say, where critics agree and disagree, what happened with that day-one patch, and how the PC version is running so far.
1. Control Resonant's Metacritic Scores, Platform by Platform
As of launch week, Control Resonant sits at a Metascore of 83 on PlayStation 5 (based on 75 critic reviews), 83 on PC (45 reviews), and 81 on Xbox Series X|S (11 reviews). Metacritic's user score currently sits at 8.8, which the site classifies as "Generally Favorable."
For context, the original 2019 Control scored in a similar band — 85 on PC, 84 on Xbox One and 82 on PS4 — so Remedy's sequel is landing roughly in the same critical territory as its predecessor rather than dramatically outscoring or underperforming it, despite swapping protagonists, combat systems and much of the game's core structure.
2. What Critics Love: Manhattan's Weirdness, Story and Traversal
Across the review roundup, the most consistent praise goes to the game's world. Control Resonant is set in a version of Manhattan warped by "resonance," a new supernatural force layered on top of the Hiss and the Mold from the first game, and reviewers repeatedly single out the sheer strangeness of the city — streets folding into the sky, gravity flipping entire blocks upside down, and everyday objects (taxis, hotel signs, subway cars) caught mid-transformation.
Dylan Faden, Jesse Faden's brother and the new playable lead, is also getting a warm reception as a protagonist. According to Remedy's own description of the story, "a mysterious cosmic force reshapes reality itself" as Dylan searches for his missing sister, and critics have called him a compelling anchor for the game's more emotional beats. Traversal — Dylan's acrobatic movement through the game's gravity-bent environments — is another near-universal highlight, described as fluid and genuinely fun to experiment with.
For the broader story setup — who Dylan is, how he connects to Jesse, and what the "resonance" actually is — our full rundown of the game's premise, cast and release-day details covers it in depth. Remedy's own story trailer, shown during a June 2026 State of Play, is embedded below.
3. Where Reviews Split: Dylan Faden's Melee-First Combat
The biggest divide in the review roundup is combat. Unlike Jesse's ranged, telekinesis-heavy kit in the first game, Dylan fights primarily with the Aberrant weapon, a shape-shifting tool that reforms between a two-handed hammer and a pair of blades depending on the situation, backed by a smaller set of paranatural abilities.
Some critics find this new melee-first approach expressive and satisfying, praising how it forces closer, more physical engagements than the original's crowd-control-heavy playstyle. Others describe it as repetitive over a full playthrough, with a handful of reviews flagging spongy, high-health enemies and long encounters as the game's biggest weak point — some specifically noting that ability upgrades taper off in the back half while enemy health bars keep climbing, so fights that feel fresh in the opening hours can start to feel repetitive by the end. It is, by most accounts, the one part of Control Resonant that reviewers can't agree on.
4. The Day-One Patch: A Combat Fix That Triggered a PC Redownload
Remedy's own response to that early combat feedback caused the launch's messiest moment. A day-one patch, released roughly an hour before the game went live, was aimed at making "Dylan's overall combat strength early on in the game" feel less underpowered, with Remedy saying the goal was to "improve the gameplay feel and flow while still providing a challenge."
The problem was on PC: the patch triggered a Steam platform mechanism that forced anyone who had already pre-loaded the roughly 92GB game to download the entire thing again from scratch, right as launch hour hit. Remedy's official CONTROL Resonant account addressed the mess directly on X shortly after:
We recently released a hotfix intended to improve the gameplay experience of CONTROL Resonant.
— CONTROL Resonant 🔻OUT NOW! (@ControlRemedy) September 24, 2026
Unfortunately, this triggered certain platform mechanisms on PC, forcing players who had already downloaded the game to download it again, thereby causing you unnecessary…
The studio followed up with a fuller apology, stating plainly: "This was an oversight on our part. We don't have an excuse, we would only like to sincerely apologise to everyone affected. We will learn from this experience and strive to prevent similar issues in the future." It's a rare, direct mea culpa for a launch-day misstep, even if it didn't make the redownload any shorter for players who hit it.
5. How PC Performance Actually Holds Up
Once installed, independent PC performance testing paints a more encouraging picture than the patch drama suggests. Shader compilation stutter — a common complaint in recent Unreal Engine 5 releases — is largely absent after an initial shader-compilation pass at startup, with only rare, minor traversal and asset-streaming hitches reported.
The bigger technical issue is frame pacing rather than shader stutter: testing found disproportionately low 1% and 0.1% frame-rate lows in geometry- and NPC-heavy areas, an issue that becomes more noticeable with DLSS Multi Frame Generation enabled, where some setups saw inconsistent frame delivery and GPU underutilization even on high-end cards like the RTX 4090. CPU performance, by contrast, is strong across the board. For players chasing the smoothest experience, dropping Indirect Lighting from Ultra to High, reducing Volumetric Lighting to Medium and disabling SDF Reflections reportedly recovers a large chunk of performance with a comparatively small visual cost.
6. How Players on Steam Are Reacting
Player sentiment on Steam has landed close to the critic consensus. As of this week, Control Resonant holds a "Very Positive" user rating on Steam, with around 89% of roughly 2,200 reviews marked positive — a solid showing for a sequel that changed as much as this one did, even accounting for the launch-week patch frustration and the PC performance quirks noted above.
7. Should You Buy Control Resonant Now, or Wait?
If you loved the original Control for its atmosphere, world design and steady drip of strange lore, the review consensus suggests Control Resonant delivers all of that and then some — Manhattan's paranatural transformation is by far the game's strongest selling point, and Dylan Faden's story is landing well with critics. If your enjoyment of the first game leaned more on its ranged, telekinesis-driven combat, it's worth going in aware that the melee-first Aberrant weapon is the one element reviewers can't agree on, and that some players report the fighting getting repetitive in the back half.
On PC specifically, the launch-day redownload mess is a one-time inconvenience rather than an ongoing problem, and the underlying performance — outside of the DLSS Multi Frame Generation frame-pacing issue Remedy is still investigating — is in reasonably good shape for a fresh Unreal Engine 5 release. Players sensitive to frame-time consistency may want to hold off on Multi Frame Generation specifically until a patch addresses it, or simply dial in the lighting settings mentioned above for a smoother baseline experience.
Quick recap
- Control Resonant scores 83 on PS5, 83 on PC and 81 on Xbox Series X|S on Metacritic, with an 8.8 user score.
- Critics broadly praise the world, story and traversal, and are split on the new melee-first Aberrant weapon combat.
- A day-one patch meant to fix early-game combat balance forced many pre-loaded PC players to redownload the full game; Remedy has publicly apologized.
- Shader stutter is minimal on PC, but frame pacing dips in busy areas, especially with DLSS Multi Frame Generation enabled.
- Steam users have kept the game at a "Very Positive" rating, around 89% positive, in launch week.
Control Resonant arrived the same week as another major genre release — for a look at how the new Silent Hill game fared with critics, see our coverage of Silent Hill: Townfall's review scores and reception. And if you missed the basics on Dylan Faden's debut, catch up with our launch trailer and release-date breakdown before diving in.
Official Resources
- Remedy Entertainment: Control Resonant launch announcement
- Official Control Resonant website
- Control Resonant on Steam
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