Control Resonant Ships With an Assist Mode Players Can Adjust at Any Time

The assist mode is reachable from the game's pause menu, the preview states. Players can adjust how much damage they deal and receive, how wide the window is for pulling off dodges, and can grant themselves immortality or the ability to kill enemies in one hit. Several presets offer something closer to traditional difficulty options for players who do not want to work through individual sliders. The Verge reports that the game encourages players to try it with assist mode disabled, but that there is no penalty for turning it on, and no need to reload a save after doing so.

The preview describes a game that is not easy. Control Resonant places players in large open areas where they may leap between walls and ceilings while swarms of otherworldly enemies attempt to crush them, and some enemies take a long time to defeat. The Verge's writer said he died often, and that the assist mode kept frustration from building by allowing quick adjustments to the difficulty.

According to the preview, the writer began using assist mode early, when the character had few combat abilities or passive skills and fights were regularly going badly. Small adjustments made him somewhat more powerful without removing the challenge, and after several hours of leveling up he turned assist mode off to raise the difficulty again. He continued to toggle it on and off as he played, sometimes to move past fights he found boring so he could reach the story beats and locations he values in Remedy games.

The approach was used most often on bosses, which the preview describes as awe-inspiring spectacles with very large health bars. The writer said he typically started a boss fight with assist mode disabled and then adjusted settings incrementally in his favor after each death, aiming to keep the thrill of the fight while reducing the obstacle.

Assist mode was also used to move through the game's sprawling maps, which the preview says are filled with secrets and quests. In one area, the protagonist Dylan is compelled to track down pieces of strange mold and eat them. Expecting the quest waypoints to be guarded by enemies he did not want to fight, the writer turned on immortality and one-hit kills to clear those encounters quickly and reach the narrative reveals, then disabled those abilities for the boss at the end of the quest.

The preview is critical of parts of the game. It states that Control Resonant has too much bloat, with too many enemies wandering the maps and too many open-world activities, and that the combat is not interesting enough, as in a FromSoftware title or Capcom's recent Onimusha: Way of the Sword, to make the difficulty feel worth enduring. It also notes large difficulty spikes similar to those in the original Control. Remedy patched an assist mode into Control after launch; with Resonant, the feature is present from the start. According to The Verge, the setting let the writer set his own pace and see the game's set-pieces and twists on his own terms.