Control Resonant Wants 'To Challenge' What’s Come Before In Action Games — IGN First

Remedy didn't add melee to Control. They deleted the gun.

That single decision — swapping the Service Weapon's shape-shifting arsenal for The Aberrant, a skeletal melee instrument that unfolds into dual blades, a defense-crushing hammer, and forms still unrevealed — tells you everything about Resonant's ambition. Most studios would treat melee as a secondary system, a panic button for when ammo runs dry. Remedy made it the only system. The shapeshifting gun, Control's mechanical heart and marketing hook, is gone. In its place: a weapon that demands you stand inside the enemy's swing radius and read their telegraphs like a fight game veteran.

The result lands with a physicality that shooters rarely achieve. Three hours in, the combat feels less like a Remedy game with swords stapled on and more like the studio finally built the character-action title they've secretly wanted since 2019. Lead gameplay designer Sergey Mohov confirms it: concept art for a Service Weapon melee form existed during the first Control's development. They had the idea. They had the art. They didn't have the courage — or the structural permission — to commit. First Control needed to plant a flag in familiar territory. Third-person shooter. Remedy's known vocabulary. The RPG systems — side quests, dialogue choices, deeper customization — were the experiment. The gun was the safety net.

Resonant burns the net.

Director Mikael Kasurinen frames the first game as "starting from a place of familiarity." Fair. But familiarity breeds imitation. Resonant's aggression-first mandate — articulated by Kasurinen as non-negotiable — rejects the cover-shooter grammar that still dominates big-budget action. You don't hug walls in Manhattan's corrupted zones. You vault railings, chain air-dashes, treat architecture as a jungle gym. The arenas aren't designed for angles; they're designed for approach vectors. Every encounter becomes a navigation puzzle solved at sprint speed.

Scepticism is healthy here. Remedy has never shipped a pure melee game. Alan Wake's flashlight-and-pistol dance, Quantum Break's weird traversal, Control's Service Weapon — all rely on range as a pacing lever. Melee collapses that lever. If the dodge window feels generous, the game becomes a spectacle fighter. If it's tight, it becomes a frustration engine. The skill tree's depth — "extensive" per early access — could either let players author distinct builds or bloat the progression with passive stat nozzles. The Aberrant's form-switching must carry tactical weight, not just visual flair. A hammer that breaks shields but moves like wet cement isn't a choice; it's a chore.

But the early feel argues for the former. The weapon's malleability fits Dylan's brutalist posture — a fist wrapped in rebar and concrete dust, tearing up street slabs with every ground pound. That tactile feedback, the screen-shake heft Remedy has refined across three titles, translates to melee better than expected. The studio's animation priority — cancel windows, hit pause, follow-through — reads instantly. You sense the commitment frames before the UI tells you.

The RPG layer is the unknown variable. Control's side quests and dialogue trees were pleasant but peripheral. Resonant's skill tree needs to rewire moment-to-moment decisions, not just gate damage numbers behind nodes. If picking a hammer specialization changes how you space-control a room — not just how fast health bars drop — the fusion works. If it's Diablo-style passive stacking on a Devil May Cry chassis, the experiment fails its own hypothesis.

Remedy knows the stakes. Kasurinen's "Remedy version of an RPG franchise" line wasn't marketing fluff. It was a design thesis. Resonant is the proof pass. The studio challenges what came before — not just their own history, but the genre's default assumption that action RPGs mean stat sheets overlaid on shooter loops. They're arguing that aggression, mobility, and weapon authorship can carry the role-playing weight. No cover. No ammo counts. No safe distance.

Manhattan's corrupted streets will judge the thesis. But the fact that Remedy walked away from their signature mechanic to make the argument? That's already the most interesting thing they've done.