Today is Control Resonant's launch day, and as I wrote in our review, it's peak Remedy. It's a gorgeously surreal atmosphere to sink into—but I had one main complaint. Its combat system centers around building ways to turn your piddly attacks into heavy hitters, which has the unfortunate side effect of making most of its hours of monster fighting a slog of inflated health pools.
Or at least, that was the case until earlier today. Ahead of launch, Remedy released a launch day hotfix that essentially looked me in the eye to say, Nice review you wrote there—would be a real shame if someone made it irrelevant.
In a Steam news post explaining its changes, Remedy said it's been "keeping a close eye" on player feedback, and based on early responses has juiced protagonist Dylan Faden's combat performance to cut down on the game's pervasive damage sponginess.
"Based on what we have seen so far, we have decided to deploy a hotfix (1.3.3) at launch to address a few specific things: enemy health pools feeling too high, requiring too many hits to Falter (stun) enemies for executions, and Dylan’s overall combat strength early on in the game not feeling powerful enough (even if the man just woke up from a coma)," Remedy said. "We strongly believe these changes will improve the gameplay feel and flow while still providing a challenge."
In other words, Remedy took what I advised in the review—that players should use the in-game Assist Mode settings to spare themselves collective hours of chipping away at health bars by boosting Dylan's outgoing damage and Falter buildup—and made it the default experience.
And that's fine! It's fine. It'll be a better time for everyone else. It's just that I fought a lot of things during those 30 hours of my life. That's all. But I'm fine!
Remedy also made sure to note that, if you still want to do more fiddling with flow of shapeshifting weapons and boulder-throwing, there's a suite of granular Assist Mode options like enemy aggression adjustments and ability recovery rates for fine-tuning your play experience. If you want, you can even turn Dylan invulnerable and basically set combat to "no." If that sounds appealing, go with God. I won't judge. It's not like it's your job to know.
And if it was someone's job, I'm sure they'd be acting very normal about it.
Control Resonant is available now on Steam.
