Remedy let reviews for Control Resonant out on 18 September, six days before the game reaches shops on the 24th. Across the eight scored verdicts I could verify on 20 September, the average is 7.5 — and the range runs from 4 to 10.
Six points. On a ten-point scale. For context, the aggregators are sitting around 84 from between fifty-six and sixty-five critics, which is a number that says “well liked” and hides the argument completely.
Everyone agrees about the environments
Read enough of these and the agreement gets conspicuous. Push Square called the spaces some of the best-looking environments of the console generation. GameSpot led on the art direction. GamesRadar, on its way to three stars out of five, still reached for “wondrous supernatural vistas.”
Even the outlet that gave it four out of ten spent its objections on what Remedy built around the look.
So the environment team shipped something close to unanimous, in a review cycle where almost nothing else was. That is rare enough to note, and it is also the thing that makes the low scores worth reading rather than dismissing. Nobody here is saying the game looks bad.
The split is about repetition and the map
The complaints line up with each other more neatly than the scores do. Combat that gets repetitive. Busywork in the spaces between. A map that several reviewers found actively unpleasant to use — GameSpot, which handed over a 9, still singled it out.
Underneath that sits the structural change. Resonant moves the fighting toward melee, which ComicBook read as a waste of what Remedy is good at, and Destructoid read as the best thing in it. Same pivot, opposite verdicts. Add the shift from one building to a paranatural Manhattan and you have two large bets landing on different people in different ways.
What the first Control got for free
Here is the part I keep turning over as someone who builds environments.
The Oldest House was a closed box. One building, authored end to end, where every corridor that folded in on itself was placed by hand because a designer decided that corridor should fold there. The spatial trick was the level design. It could be bespoke in every instance because there were a finite number of instances. The game was that building.
Open the structure up and the same trick has to become a system. Shifting architecture that used to be a set piece now needs rules, reusable parts, and enough coverage to fill hours of a city rather than minutes of a corridor. Kit pieces get authored once and placed many times. Encounter spaces get a vocabulary so they can be assembled instead of built. That is how you fill the volume, and it is also exactly the process that produces the word reviewers reached for: repetitive.
The blog has been round this before from the other end, with a 256km² map where every match is decided inside a 2km box. The scale and the content are separate budgets, and the second one is always smaller than the first.
Remedy had good reason to do it. The studio has been trying to get out of one building since 2019, and a sequel that shipped the Oldest House again would have drawn its own three-star reviews for different reasons. The environment work carrying near-unanimous praise while the structure underneath it splits the room eight ways is a specific kind of outcome, and artists should recognise it. Good surfaces do not fix a content loop. They never have.
The number
7.5, an arithmetic mean of eight published scores between 4 and 10, converted to a 1-10 scale and rounded to the nearest half point.
Read it with care. Eight is a thin sample against the fifty-plus the aggregators counted, and mine is skewed toward the extremes, because the reviews people linked and argued about this week were the 10 and the 4. The aggregate 84 is probably closer to where the middle of the profession landed. What the aggregate will not tell you is that a six-point range exists at all.
That range is the useful information. A tight spread means critics broadly agree on what a game was going for. A spread like this one means the game asks something of you that some players will take and others will refuse, which makes it much harder to tell from a number whether you are one of them. We saw the same shape three weeks ago, when a thirty-day clock split the verdicts on Blood of Dawnwalker across a three-and-a-half point range.
If you loved the Oldest House for being a building you could learn, wait for someone whose taste you trust to tell you what the city feels like at hour fifteen. If you were waiting for Remedy to stop making the same corridor, the 9s and the 10 are for you.
Scores collected on 20 September 2026 from published reviews and roundups, converted to a 1-10 scale and averaged. Aggregate figures are the aggregators’ own. CONTROL Resonant is out 24 September 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.