For some reason, it feels like I’ve played a million games like Control: Override. Part of the reason for that is how it reminds me of the indie passion projects you’d sometimes stumble across on mobile markets half a decade ago, back when releasing premium games that way was somewhat viable. Regardless of their quality, each game would bring something interesting to the table and remain tightly paced since the teams were small enough that they couldn’t afford to worry about (and subsequently overcompensate for) a short playtime. Control: Override only lasts a few hours, pairs a decent story with decent gameplay, and has a convenient rewind feature that limits the frustration of mistakes. However, it also makes these mistakes incredibly common by forcing you to contend with fiddly controls, and these controls prevent some of the game’s most clever puzzles from shining.
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Pitting a hacker against an AI he helped to create is an interesting (but wordy) setup
You play as Gillian, a misanthropic white-hat hacker who’s enlisted by his former boss to eliminate the AI he helped to create after it spirals out of control. Gillian left the project with a barge worth of guilt after the mysterious suicide of Rhava, his friend and fellow programmer, so coming back to destroy the AI they created together can lead him to revisit the circumstances that built up to this especially traumatic part of his career, spurred on by the appearance of detailed logs from that time period that are haphazardly scattered about in plain view. Some are encrypted and can only be decrypted after viewing the others, however, and it’s ultimately left to the player whether to read these logs or consider them one of the AI’s tricks.
I chose to read the logs and was able to obtain two of Control: Override‘s endings as a result. Since the game clearly tracks whether or not you’ve been reading logs, I suspect that the third ending is obtained by ignoring all of them and destroying the AI at the end without trying to piece together any of the other details.
Like so much else about Control: Override, I’d characterize the writing as decent. It’s certainly much better than I was expecting after noticing that the colon in the game title is used in three different ways in the Steam title, Steam description, and email I received the game key in (and this inconsistency is a pretty major red flag right off the bat).
The AI’s banter with Gillian is sufficiently amusing, with chunks of levels being broken up by conversations about the past and its motivations, and the emails are believably written, even if many of them convey the same basic thoughts over and over again. Still, I question the wisdom of a game centering around three major characters giving two of those characters names that begin with the same letter. In addition to the late Rhava, many conversations involve Rossi, the money guy, and it’s hard to differentiate between the two early on since they appear exclusively in leaked emails. Without faces or anything else to differentiate the two, your brain learns one name and then tries to autocomplete every name with an R.
The ending is also quite a bit wordier than it should be. I understand and appreciate the desire to wrap everything up, but saving so many explanations for the very end results in a pretty major text dump that feels like it takes upwards of a minute even if you hold the escape button to skip each line as quickly as possible. Most conversations with the AI are relatively quick chats, but that last one is a real talky handful.
Control: Override‘s puzzles are very “outside the box,” but its controls are pure agony
Each level is a security layer Gillian is bypassing, and the goal is always to get to a yellow exit point without hitting any lasers. The interesting thing about Control: Override is that you don’t have all of your movement controls at the beginning of each level but instead have to manually pick them up by maneuvering into range and then using your interaction beam. Another interesting thing is that these controls don’t only apply to you, but can also be lent out to purple objects to move them in different directions and, say, block a pesky laser beam. Later levels require figuring out that you can clip or fall through purple objects if they crush you in certain ways, allowing you to influence pieces from a new vantage point or bypass lasers.
It’s all very clever; I’ve always appreciated games that allow you to tackle problems in ways that leave you uncertain whether you figured out the solution or broke the game to accomplish the same result (ReCore comes immediately to mind), and Control: Override consistently left me unsure if I was solving things correctly.
The biggest gameplay negative would be the constant frustration of the control scheme. I began playing Control: Override using a controller, but by default, movement is handled using the analog stick, and jumping is accomplished by pressing the stick up despite one of the face buttons also functioning as a jump button. As a result, I found myself leaping into lasers whenever my right or left stick movement drifted anywhere close to an upward direction. This happened a lot.
I tried remapping the controls, but this only made it worse. At the root of the problem is Control: Override‘s system of assigning directions to platforms; using a direction by moving that way selects it as the direction your beam assigns to objects, which is intuitive but not always practical (since you can’t jump to set an up direction when you’re huddled under a laser). The other way of choosing a direction is by cycling through them with the D-pad directions, and cycling is also a thing when playing with a mouse and keyboard. I could never reconcile these two different systems.
The perfect control scheme would have been one that allowed me to assign each direction to a face button, movement to the D-pad, and everything else wherever it fits. Even that wouldn’t have solved the weirdness of unassigning directions from objects, though. If you’ve assigned the direction right to an object and then assign left to that same object, your right direction is automatically freed up. If, however, you’ve assigned right to an object and then try to assign right to a different object, it doesn’t work. You have to manually press a button to sever the connection from the first object, and only then can you assign it to something else. This inconsistency constantly threw me for a loop and made it easy to faceplant into lasers.
Control: Override‘s visuals and music are decent, but there’s way too little variation here
There are some interesting visual flourishes here, such as the screen shattering pleasantly upon finishing a level and an occasional zoom in/out to give you a better view of the overall stage once you’ve completed its initial portion, but this is also ultimately a game about a neon red box navigating a bunch of green and purple boxes. The visuals get busier as more lasers and interactive elements are added to ramp up the difficulty, but the visual style remains the same throughout the entire game. The same goes for the soundtrack, which has a couple of keepers but mostly leaves you listening to one repetitive song that all 47 levels share. I don’t understand that decision. It’s exhausting listening to one track for several hours. On the bright side, Control: Override uses sidechaining to duck its volume whenever sound effects play. More games should use sidechaining.
Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*A Steam key was provided for this Control: Override review. It took me around 3½ hours to finish the game and obtain two of its three endings. The third would probably require replaying the game.
Control: Override review – Decent puzzles, terrible controls first appeared on Killa Penguin
