Mini-review/Quick thoughts after beating the game (no dlc)

Picked it up when it was free on the epic store as I love metroidvanias and had heard that this was pretty much the closest thing to a 3d one.

I just beat the main game (all the missions and most of the secrets but not the hidden locations) and wanted to get my thoughts down.

Good stuff:

• The first half of the game was extremely cool; the setting was interesting and I'm a huge sucker for surreal/cosmic horror stuff. I found myself ignoring the main story mission and fully exploring (as much as possible) all of the areas when I found them. I even beat the anchor before I found the flight upgrade (which is a huge + for me, one of my favorite parts of metroidvanias is doing stuff out of order).

• I really liked the worldbuilding found in all the reports, memos, and media you discovered.

• Controls felt good, never felt like I was fighting them.

• Some of the characters were great. I really liked Darling's storyline.

• The side missions that were more than just go kill a guy (or guys) were fun

Not so good stuff:

• The ending of the story was pretty disappointing. The story never really made me care about Jesse or Dylan, I found myself way more interested in the other characters such as Darling.

• The stronger I got the more boring combat was. I maxed out the telekinesis ability and found myself never even needing to use the guns. Even the floating enemies who were supposed to be able to dodge would die to it.

• Not enough variation in enemies which became pretty apparent the further you went. You had invisible birds, mindless exploding guys that ran at you, flying guys that used telekinesis, guys that used the shield ability, and normal grunts. Sometimes the grunts would use different weapons but that's about it.

• The exploration did not feel rewarding. You might find a cool room but then your only reward is a mod that's worse than the ones that randomly drop from enemies.

• After I beat the main story and all the missions I could find, I went and looked to see if there was stuff that I had missed. After other games like hollow knight, I expected there to be big stuff I had missed such as secret rooms, upgrades, alternate endings, or even whole areas. Not the case at all unfortunately. I had found pretty much everything major (minus a few hidden rooms but all they had were chests in them with more mods I didn't need).

• Some of the dialogue was reeeaaally awkward.

• Maybe I'm misremembering but were there really no bosses in the main story quest? You had a few optional ones (moss thing, former 2x, anchor, reflection) but the main quest was just you vs waves of grunts which was pretty lame. I was hoping for a big showdown vs Dylan or cosmic horror type creature that was the source of the Hiss.

Random thoughts:

• I feel like not adding more secret and optional areas was a big miss, specifically areas that aren't just more government bureau rooms. As I mentioned before, I was kind of blown away that I had almost 100% the map without looking anything up. I was hoping that it would be more like hollow knight where I beat the game then check online and find that I had missed a good 1/4 of the map. I think part of this was because pretty much all of the optional stuff was very much on rails. You would get a red arrow over one of the main cast's heads which would prompt you to go to the optional area and do a mission, following map checkpoints.

• The Ashtray maze was pretty weird for me because most people's comments said it was their favorite part but it was not what I expected at all. I guess the name kind of tricks you but I expected a super difficult puzzle that leads you to a 'Eureka!' moment where you figured it out instead of the action movie music sequence it ended up being. It just felt a bit at odds with the rest of the game. I think part of the issue for me was by this point in the game, I was one-shotting every enemy with triple launch so there wasn't much challenge.

Sorry for the rambling but just wanted to get my thoughts out. All-in-all I did enjoy the game and do not regret playing it. I probably won't get the DLC since from what I've seen it doesn't really address any of the things I was hoping for more of in the base game. I do look forward to Control 2 though, will definitely get on release.

I think my rating would be a 3.5/5