Control Resonant is the sequel to the cult classic Control, arriving a bit more than seven years after the original. Seven years have also passed in-game, with the Oldest House in lockdown for most of that time. Recently, however, the Hiss breached the Oldest House and started spreading across Manhattan, while Jesse Faden, who's now the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, has gone missing.

Her younger brother, Dylan Faden, has been in a coma for the past seven years, but he wakes up at the beginning of the game and takes Jesse's place as the playable character. Dylan's search for Jesse and for answers about what's happening across Manhattan takes him all around the island, which is now swarming with extradimensional entities that are wreaking havoc all over the place. Control Resonant takes place across relatively large maps—at least compared to the first game—that are interconnected, with Dylan focusing on dispatching enemies with a melee weapon called the Aberrant, which can take many forms, each with its own ability tree.

The engine powering Control Resonant is Northlight, an in-house engine that Remedy has used for a number of its titles, starting with Quantum Break in 2016. The latest version of the engine supports ray tracing and path tracing, as well as DLSS and FSR upscaling and NVIDIA's fresh-out-of-the-oven DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. You can also use DLSS and FSR frame generation, but there's no sign of XeSS upscaling or frame generation.

Our handheld PC performance review will test Control Resonant across a range of popular PC handhelds, and we'll also provide optimized settings for each handheld used in the testing.