Remedy could have made Control again. It made something else. Control Resonant stars Jesse's brother Dylan, leaves the Oldest House for a Manhattan that's folding in on itself, and swaps the gunplay for melee. It launches Thursday, September 24.
## Where the scores landed Metacritic has the PS5 version at 84 from 63 critic reviews: 59 positive, three mixed, one negative. PC sits at 83 and Xbox at 81 on smaller samples. That's "generally favorable," a step under the acclaim a lot of people expected after the first game. (Metacritic)
## The split The range is the story. IGN Benelux gave it a 100 and called it "one of the best action RPGs ever made." GamingBolt went 90: "a stunning paranatural epic with fantastic combat." At the other end, ComicBook's reviewer gave it a 40, calling the melee "bafflingly hollow, relentlessly repetitive, and poorly balanced." Gamer.no's 80 sits in the middle: beautiful world, but it "stumbles at the finish line" on characters. The recurring complaint across the positive reviews is that combat thins out in the back half. (GameSpot, Kotaku)
## Why the swing matters Control in 2019 was a third-person shooter built like a Metroidvania. Resonant is a twitchy melee action RPG closer to Devil May Cry, with more exploration and role-playing systems. Remedy says it kept "key tenets of storytelling and spectacle" from the first one. When a studio changes the core verb of its game, the score spread tells you who it was made for. An 84 with that range says most people came along.
## The lane This is a single-player, story-first game from the studio behind Alan Wake 2, coming out in the same week as Silent Hill: Townfall and eight weeks before GTA 6. If you want one big story game before November 19 takes over your life, this is the one the critics are pointing at.
## Sources - CONTROL Resonant critic reviews: Metacritic, accessed Sept. 22, 2026 - Control Resonant review: GameSpot - Control Resonant: The Kotaku Review: Kotaku - Control Resonant: Wikipedia