Control Resonant's Assist Mode Lets You Tune Every Fight, Slider by Slider

Honestly, this kind of news makes me happier than most trailers do.

Control Resonant lands on PS5 on September 24, and Remedy has just walked through how its expanded Assist Mode works. Instead of choosing Easy, Normal or Hard from a menu and hoping you guessed right, you get a whole panel of individual settings, each one nudging a different piece of the combat.

And this time that really matters, because the fighting is changing. Dylan's new shapeshifting melee weapon, the Aberrant, pulls the action up close. Remedy's lead gameplay designer describes combat as demanding: you read enemy attacks, manage staggers and status effects, and time your dodges. That's quite a shift from the first Control, and the studio openly admits it comes with a learning curve. Rather than lean on a few traditional difficulty levels, they decided to hand players the dials.

So what can you actually change?

Quite a lot. You can lower Enemy Aggression so foes attack less often, widen the Perfect Dodge Window and slow down Enemy Projectile Speed. Incoming and Outgoing Damage each get their own setting. Outgoing Falter changes how quickly an enemy's posture breaks, Power Recovery Speed recharges your abilities faster, and Enhanced Melee Magnetizing makes your swings more forgiving when your positioning is a bit off.

Then there are the big switches: Immortality, One-Hit Kills and One-Hit Falters. If you just want the story, the story is yours.

What I love is how precise it all is. Maybe dodging is your nemesis but you're fine taking hits - widen the window, leave everything else alone, and you still get the fight Remedy designed. Maybe you've got forty minutes after the kids are in bed and you simply want to see what happens next. There are presets too, for anyone who'd rather not fiddle.

Two details made me grin. First, no trophies are locked behind Assist Mode. Thank you, Remedy. Cutting people off from a Platinum because they needed a little help always felt mean to me, and it's great to see a studio refuse to do it. Second, the sliders go both ways, so if Normal feels like a warm-up to you, you can crank things up instead.

Who this is really for

I keep thinking of the friend who adored the strangeness of the first game and then quietly stopped playing at a tough boss. Or players whose hands don't cooperate like they used to. Or people who are new to action games and would love to try one that isn't just a reflex test. A menu like this tells all of them they're welcome, without making anyone feel like they're playing the "baby version".

Remedy builds some of the weirdest, most memorable worlds on console. I'm really glad more people will get to walk all the way through this one.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Playstation_Dualsense_controller.jpg