Tips (2)

Unlock the secrets of Control with expert tips on combat, ability upgrades, inventory management, and trophy hunting. Master the Oldest House and defeat the Hiss.

Control is not a cover shooter, but that doesn't mean you can't take cover. Pillars and ledges block enemy attacks like you expect them to. That said, mobility is important: enemies will flank you and there are suicide bombers who will make their way to where you're hiding and detonate themselves. Also, the only way to heal damage is to run into the open and pick up the Health Elements left behind by former enemies.

You have an ability tree to unlock but not all abilities are equal. Concentrate initially on increasing your health bar and the damage inflicted by your Launch ability. The side abilities from Launch can wait. After this, spend points on improving your Shield ability and increasing your energy bar. Spending points in Seize is lower priority and improving your melee attack is lowest priority of all. Your melee attack is powerful, for sure, but so are the melee attacks of your enemies which makes melee range an unhealthy distance from which to engage your foes.

The Shield, Seize and Evade abilities are unlocked in supposed side missions. However, you should not consider these optional. There are certain enemies that are to all intents and purposes unbeatable without Shield, Seizing enemies helps balance very uneven odds and Evade gives you invulnerability frames that let you tank what might otherwise be fatal attacks.

If you pick up an item using Launch and want to drop it rather than actually Launch it, you can do so by pressing the interaction button (square on the PS4).

You will acquire lots and lots of mods as you fight enemies and open loot containers but you only have finite space to hold them. Therefore, get into the habit of clearing out your inventory. You might want multiple Damage Boost mods but you almost certainly don't want multiple Levitation Ammo Efficiency mods. Therefore, if you find a better mod than one you already have, get rid of the old one. If you pick up rubbish, get rid of it right away. On a related note, since you find lots of mods, spend resources on upgrading your weapons rather than constructing more mods. Very late in the game when you have unlocked the ability to construct Infinity level mods, it may be worth constructing them. Unfortunately, the chances of wasting scarce resources on making something useless is quite high.

You have a non-obvious crouch control (R3 on the PS4). This is also the control shared by an ability called Ground Slam which is part of the Levitation ability tree. Trust me when I say that you want to remap this button (I chose the down on the digital pad). Otherwise, you'll find yourself repeatedly using Ground Slam when all you want to do is rotate the camera (right analog stick, as you'd expect). I figured this one out after "ground slamming" into a certain boss enemy four of five times, which was an instant fatality. I wish I'd figured it out when I was trying to get to a certain Hidden Location that required changing the camera angle while Levitating.

The AWE supplement added an Assist Mode that can be accessed from the pause screen menu. Among other things, this allows you to toggle Immortality and One-Hit Kills. As far as I am aware, this does not affect trophies.

Trophies

The platinum trophy for Control is one of the more difficult ones that I've unlocked. The main reason is that it's a difficult game to start with and pretty much nothing is optional: you have to unlock the entire ability tree which requires you to do every side mission and you have to explore every square foot of the Oldest House to find Hidden Locations and Control Points. You also have to kill all five optional superbosses.

That said, I ended up with an excess of five Ability Points and I did _everything_. Therefore, here is a suggestion for things can be left out while still acquiring enough Ability Points to unlock all abilities:

• The first Hidden Location in the Executive Sector
• The first Hidden Location in the Research Sector
• The second part of a side mission called "Langston's Runaways" that has you fight a boss that you've already defeated.

With the Ultimate Edition, those five points are still useful, however, so you may want to unlock them. Interestingly, after playing both expansions, I still had five points left over.

Something you can do to help unlock the platinum is to always have three Board Countermeasures active until you unlock the trophy for completing 25 of them. The rewards from these can be quite decent anyway. If there's one that is annoyingly difficult to do, give up on it and select a new one. They're procedurally generated so that there are always more to choose from.

I found that Bureau Alerts stopped appearing after a certain point. Therefore, you want to get the trophy for these as soon as possible. The easiest category are the ones where you have to destroy Hiss Nodes. The ones where you have to kill "Major Targets" become manageable when you have a few Launch damage upgrades unlocked. Missions where you have to keep FBC personnel alive are all-but impossible. During the middle part of the game, Bureau Alerts are pretty common, popping up every hour or thereabouts.