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Control is a weird and interesting game from the wonderful minds at Remedy Entertainment, creators of classics such as Max Payne and Alan Wake, and honestly, it's weird they didn't name this game "Jesse Faden" after its main protagonist, but I guess, at the end of the day, the title "Control" worked better in a thematic sense.
So, what's up with Control? What's the story like? Well, you play as Jesse Faden, a young woman who arrives in New York in search of her brother, believing he might be held in the Federal Bureau of Control. When they were kids, strange events happened in their hometown, and this is when Jesse's younger brother was captured by the FBC, while she managed to run away, helped by Polaris, a mysterious entity that accompanies our hero. Once inside the FBC, things seem to take a turn for the worse, as the entire facility is on lockdown, having been invaded by a mysterious entity, only known as "the Hiss", capable of controlling the minds of unprotected FBC employees. Honestly, I can't go into much more detail, as it'd both be spoiler heavy, and incredibly trippy for me to explain. Let me say this, though, if you enjoy stories about nebulous government organizations dealing with paranormal shit, this game might be right up your alley.
Now, following on with the story, or rather the writing, I think it's one of the strongest aspects of the game. Maybe not necessarily because of the main story, that might depend on you. However, I loved all the background details you could learn about through collectibles, as it really humanizes the FBC personnel. Usually, when there's stories about mysterious organizations like the FBC, their employees are all super serious all the time. Not here, here you can see how these people were just like any other common worker; while there were some weirder characters, most of them were just people with their jobs and their regular lives, with the exception that their job consisted in protecting the public, and maybe reality itself, from threats beyond our wildest imaginations.
Gameplay wise... Well, I'll admit that after I got to the first boss, I went to the options menu and activated the "invincibility" cheat. You can still die from fall damage, it's just enemies can't kill you, and while it's true that I might've deprived myself from the challenge of combat, I still had a lot of fun with the combat, despite the lack of risks. For combat, you get a single weapon, the Service Weapon. However, it is what the game calls an "Object of Power", and it's capable of changing between different forms, although you can only have two forms equipped at the same time. Even then, you also get some cool telekinetic powers, like a melee blast, and the ability to launch random objects towards your enemies. There's a rather extensive skill tree with a lot of upgrades, and you can also upgrade all the Service Weapon forms; not to mention the "mods" you can get both for your weapon, and your character itself.
Graphically, the game looks great, though I gotta say, by the time I got to the DLCs, after beating the main story, I started experiencing some semi-frequent crashes, which made finishing them rather annoying. Speaking of the DLCs, the game includes all of them. The Expeditions DLC is a relatively simple challenge mode of sorts, for getting extra resources and such. The story DLCs, on the other hand, are The Foundation, and AWE. The first one has you go to the depths of the Oldest House (the setting of the game), in order to deal with something that threatens not only the Oldest House itself, but maybe all of reality, while AWE... Well, those initials might as well stand for the Alan Wake Experience. That's right, while the main game has some references to Alan Wake, this DLC is a straight-up crossover, with some really interesting bits of lore added to the interconnected Remedy Universe.
Finally, I was forgetting about sound design. For the most part, it's very good, though one minor annoyance I had is that the game uses your system language as default. In my case, it's Spanish, but I like playing games on English, and while you can change audio and text dialogue (I did), the Hiss' "chant" remains on the system language. Despite being my native language, I couldn't really understand what they were chanting until I learned of this fact; I guess it wasn't helped by the fact that the Spanish accent is different from Latin American accent. A cool concept, in theory, but it can get lost. Oh, another thing I was forgetting, the soundtrack; it's excellent, particularly during a certain story section that I won't spoil, but if you're familiar with Alan Wake, I'll say it involves the Old Gods of Asgard.
All things considered, I can say I recommend Control. I really enjoyed the story, and the connections it had to this expanded universe Remedy seems to be building up.