Control RTX Preview

December 8, 2019 at 4:02pm
By Jason Stettner

While it hasn’t been too long since I’ve ventured into this bizarre world that The Bureau of Control provides, it was nice to once again step into the shoes of Director Jesse. This time was different however, with the full effects of ray tracing enabled. This is the perfect sort of game for that technology, as there are vibrant and very stark colors used here.

On top of that, the reflective surfaces and wildly shiny environments are stunning with these effects enabled. I was first able to see this ray tracing in action at E3 this past year, so it’s nice to see the full experience with more depth. I didn’t venture too far in as I have ran through this not too long ago, but I played a fair bit of this again as it’s a really great game and perhaps one of the best this year.

If you’re not familiar with the title, it’s from the legendary Remedy Entertainment which has delivered glorious narrative driven experiences such as Alan Wake or Quantum Break. It’s third person, and has you using strange powers in order to deal with a breakout that’s happened within this mystical facility.

Jesse isn’t necessarily natural to this situation, but is thrust into a commanding role of being the Director after everything goes wrong. It’s a neat perspective, as you discover this world as she does. It’s hard to perfectly describe this world, as it’s beautiful to take in. There’s a distinct vibe to the cinematics and gameplay, how they merge together in such a wonderful way. There’s a sprinkle of mystery with this one. On top of that we add in RTX features for a gorgeous effect. We’re seeing this in a few core areas including shadows, reflections and lighting among other things.

There’s reflected ray traced light upon surfaces and realistic shadows as objects are hit. It was fun to break things and see the shadow adjust, though I did notice a minor delay there but so brief you wouldn’t notice it unless you were specifically playing around and looking for shadows. The reflections are just damn crazy, whether you’re looking into and through windows or just the shiny floors that line this professional building environment. It’s like every subtle detail is enhanced further, from the way the plants feel warmer to how much cleaner the whole presentation of this building is as you run through it.

The very straight up colored rooms are even more glowing to the eyes and the sense of destruction is greatly increased as extra realism is added to the objects via the ray tracing enabled there for shadows and reflections. The game offers just a ton of little tweaks when it comes to this technology, and it’s fun to play around with them. I was rolling with a RTX 2080Ti and an i9 9900k if you’re curious about the specs. To me, this was a fresh way to play it again. I was taking my time as my first run of this game was done in a walkthrough recorded style.

With this play time I was able to sit there, fiddle around with the objects or just see the effect certain things had on the world. It’s a great implementation of this technology and it makes an incredible game just that much better to experience. This is a treat to behold, and I highly suggest checking it out with the RTX features. Even if you don’t have that sort of graphics card, this is a great game that deserves to be played. It’s also sort of just really fun too. You can read our preview of RTX enabled in Quake 2’s 1.2 update below, or check out the game’s hub for additional coverage of this Remedy title.

Read our Quake 2 RTX Preview
View our Control Hub