You probably couldn’t call Control underrated, but I never felt its combat specifically got the respect it deserves. While you have a gun, and a button to crouch behind walls, it’s only really a shooter until a floppy disk gives you telekinesis and a TV lets you fly. From there, the fights – and there are a lot of them – become fully three-dimensional ballets of breathless mid-air evasives and increasingly desperate furniture-flinging. It’s dramatic and kinetic and an absolute hoot, in a way that you’d absolutely miss out on if you just think “Well it’s a Remedy game so I should probably use the pistol”. No! Throw things! I love the setting too: the brutalist headquarters of a G-man agency that’s basically the SCP Foundation if it was more laidback about granting its employees superpowers. The weird sci-fi aspect could arguably have been pushed even harder, but there are loads of mundane-made-odd mini-mysteries to dig into, and the building’s rebellious interpretations on the laws of space and time make for some striking sights and scenes. Including, thanks also to what I understood to be a haunted cassette player, one utterly brilliant musical set piece.
