Topic: Push Square Game Club Spooktacular: Resident Evil 4

@render The aesthetic of The Foundation is really fetching. In HDR it really pops with the interesting change in color scheme.

I actually was browsing through my PS5 screencaps the other day (I think I was making a quick inventory in response to the thread on here about which game has the most) and I looked at my Control pictures and was really reminded at how cool that game looks. Like you, I am not one to spend a lot of time in photo mode, but I rather enjoyed taking a few shots around the Oldest House and The Foundation.

Well I've seen the credits roll and finished the main game. In terms of level design, the ashtray maze might be one of my favourite levels in any game. It could have been so easy to make the enemies too difficult and I think something would have been lost if you had to replay it multiple times. The music absolutely f@€king slaps as well!! Have started both of the dlcs but settled on AWE. I've enjoyed all of the little media clips, Dr Darling is certainly a screen presence. The gameplay is fantastic, I played Alan Wake beforeand whilst the setting and narrative were great (controversialy, I think I might have enjoyed them more than control), the gameplay advances remedy have made her are brilliant. Control is so mechanically tight, once you start to unlock skills and weapon forms.

@R1spam Glad you like it. You’re right about the ashtray maze. One of my favorite gaming moments ever.

Hopefully you enjoy AWE, having the perspective of Alan Wake. I enjoyed it a lot, but have never played Alan Wake, so I think it’s more meaningful with the context of that game. Either way, the whole Ultimate Edition package is brilliant.

@R1spam I totally agree with you there, it’s an amazing game anyway but the ashtray maze is a standout piece. I went and played through it again in the shum arcade machine after I’d finished all the DLC it was that good.

Playing Alan Wake definitely increased my enjoyment of the AWE DLC, it really does feel like a good fit for the Control Universe, which I guess they wouldn’t have had planned at the time of making that. Both that and The Foundation are two really good bits of additional content though, and are about and right length to not drag them out to much.

I carried on and platinum it and I’m just one trophy sort of the set for The Foundation. Annoyingly it is one that relies on RNG or so it seems so I keep dipping in and out between other games. I did Returnal though so this will be easy 😆

Finished the main campaign last weekend. It is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the presentation and atmosphere. Darling and Ahti are great characters. The ashtray maze is really a stand out act. And the launch and levitate abilities give the game a unique sense of flow. The story feels a bit incoherent and the way it ends felt way too abrupt for my taste. I can see why it is a special game for many people. Unfortunately I couldn’t really connect with it.

@Mr_B021 I can understand that about the ending, I did feel a bit ‘was that it?’ with it. Darling was great though, easily a highlight for me.

I'm just playing this now for the first time and I think I've died more times on 'fridge duty' than any boss in returnal

@MatthewJP Yeah, that fight kind of comes out of nowhere. From what I remember, levitating makes it much easier as the biggest threat is falling down holes.

I completed it this week, quite enjoyed it. 3 away from the platinum so will try and get that before starting something new at Christmas.
The map is just utterly frustrating though

@Keith_Zissou which boss you struggling with?

@Keith_Zissou Is that the bridge in the panopticon? The Salvador fight itself isn’t too bad as there’s quite a bit of cover you can use in that room. Charge can be useful and helps taking the other enemies out in quick time before they get annoying.

@Keith_Zissou would agree with Renders advice but I remember he kicked my ass!! Use launch to bring down shields and then charge headshots do big damage. If you can launch back a grenade, that helps too!

@Keith_Zissou Salvador was a pain. It was hard to spam him, even with all the cover because the other enemies surround you so quickly, but I did find a little area on the far end where you can nuzzle between two walls and kinda helps from being surrounded and you can take pot shots at the enemies from relative safety. It’s not perfect though and you can still get hit from a projectile if you’re not careful.

I remember dying to Salvador at least a half dozen times before finally getting his tactics down. Pretty sure I had to look up a YouTube video of the fight just to convince my psyche that it is possible. 😅
That’s a technique I’ve employed for difficult bosses ever since I played Bloodborne. Somehow watching someone do it successfully gives me hope (and sometimes learn some good tactics) 😄

@Keith_Zissou This was my second play through of the game so perhaps it’s just been easier for me having some prior knowledge. Generally I tend to try and mix shooting with using abilities so that while one is cooling down you can use the other. That seems to work quite well in most situations but there are definitely a few enemies that get annoying. Those flying ones that throw things at you seem to be in abundance around the panopticon, as will as those ones that explode when they get near you. For those the shield ability comes in really handy which if you haven’t got already is worth acquiring as soon as you can…

https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/control-how-to-get-the-shie...

@Keith_Zissou @render I personally didn’t get a lot out of the shield ability. It definitely was a nice tool to mix in during certain situations though. As a whole I liked to mainly utilize dashing and the environment when possible as my defense techniques since it doesn’t use up your energy like the shield.

The floating enemies are tough. They dodge a lot of the attacks since they can dash too. If I recall correctly, you need to stun them with shots from a fast weapon like the pistol or the sniper gun form, and then you’ll be able to bludgeon them with throwing things via telekinesis for bigger damage once they can’t dodge for a few moments.

But yeah, like render says, regardless of playstyle, one of the key things you do need to learn to do is switch back and forth during combat between using your abilities and shooting the weapon. Getting into a rhythm is important and when done correctly and with the right power ups equipped, you’ll be able to almost constantly reign down attacks by switching back and forth.

I’m trying to remember the structure of the missions, but it could be that you do need to save this for later until you gain more abilities, weapons, and power-ups. There is a slight issue with balancing in the game and I do remember feeling like the game was pretty easy then suddenly run into a section or a boss that just ate my lunch out of nowhere.

It is important to note too (and I didn’t really realize this until I was really far into the game) that when you die you lose some currency, so there is a penalty. It’s not much, I think it’s a small percentage of your total, but it’s enough that if you are banging your head against a wall on a certain encounter and dying more than a few times that it’s best to try to go elsewhere for a while due to the death penalties. That said, I platinum’d the game and still had several of the encounters where I just kept going back dying over and over. 😅

@Keith_Zissou one last tip is that the goons on the bridge, you can just run past them dark souls style and they won't follow you once you drop down to the boss arena 👍

Sorry I been out of this for a while because I've been moving house. Finally got the Megatron set up (12 HDMI devices on one TV woop! - all neatly cable managed and labelled in a TV unit I modified with official and not so official modifications...) So hopefully will get a chance to carry on with Control this week. Going to polish of Halo Infinite first I think.

Had a good sit down today and played some more of this game, I think I'm a bit over half way through it.

It is a bit confusing still, ive done all the side stuff I can do. I got a fungal lady making something that I'm waiting on, I've got a training area behind a red door that hasn't passed yet and I've just got the flight ability so I can go and do that object of power. There's a guy looking at something too so I might go try and relieve him if I can do that now.

My Launch ability is maxed out, not sure why I went that way with the skill tree but it seems to make fights easier.

Still a bit unsure about the graphics. It regularly looks a lot worse than Quantum Break and I'm really not sure if that's because I'm playing on weaker hardware or not. Textures take ages to load which kinda sucks when there are a lot of quick edits during the in engine cutscenes.

@Keith_Zissou did you do the Salvador bit in the end? I was "seizing" the other guards by holding Square on them when they had low health. Took the edge off the fight a bit. I found the mould retrieval side quest a bit harder than Salvador to be honest. Lots of weird difficulty spikes in this game all over the place.

@Keith_Zissou yeah I'll stick with it, for a few reasons. One is that it's a PS Plus game and I want to tick it off my list (I have a mental OCD about at least trying each PS Plus game and playing through all of the better ones). Two is that I played through the other Remedy games, Alan Wake, American Nightmare and Quantum Break so is the last one unless I go back to play Max Payne too. Three is that I'm more than halfway through so it would be a shame to give up now!

Its not a bad game by any means, i'm just playing it at a weird time in my life where I'm moving to a new apartment so my time is limited but also my ability to engage and get invested in the game is distracted by real world projects.

That and the already voiced opinion that I am playing it on Base PS4 instead of the One X that I own or the PS5/Series X that I don't own so I feel like I'm not getting the "best" experience technically. Textures are soft, if they load at all. Frame rate isn't great but at least it's not giving me a headache. It's hard to tell if it's hardware or if the game is too ambitious in scope but limited technically. Quantum Break was fairly similar but seemed more polished than Control. But then again, it's trying to do less things than Control is.

Hopefully will finish the game and the DLCs in the next few days anyway. I'm nearly there, I just wish I had more time to devote to it really. I'm going to do the side missions but it seems like there's a lot of stuff that could be quite addictive and fun like the Bureau Alerts (which I haven't done any of) and the gun upgrades/crafting and skill tree. As it stands though, I probably won't get much time to invest in that barring what I have to do to complete the game and DLC.

I used to love Duke 3D when I was a kid! I actually own the new version on all the main consoles now but I haven't had much time to put into it. Would be good to actually beat it without putting in the DNGOD cheat that I used to use when I was little 😂. I think that was the invincibility, I can't remember what the infinite guns/ammo cheat was. I remember one cheat was DNCLIP and it would allow you to clip through walls and go anywhere in the level. Awesome game though!

@ralphdibny After playing Quantum Break not that long ago of course and Control twice on both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, I can safely say Control is better graphically. Quantum Break looks good for an early last gen game, but it was obvious every time I saw Courtney Hope's character that the textures and detail weren't close since she's also the main character in Control and obviously saw her quite a bit in that. That is not taking into account the fact that I've also tested the new gen versions of it just to see what it looked like (I plan on finally playing through the new gen version sometime this year).