Having beaten the game a while back, I've now been watching various videos and podcasts and such talking about Remedy's Control Resonant, sequel to 2019's Control and third official (and fourth actual, at least until/unless Max Payne and Quantum Break are somehow rescued from IP-rights hell and worked into it) game in the larger Remedy Connected Universe.
One of the things that surprised me was complaints about the combat feeling slow because of spongey foes. Now, certainly the big Resonant bosses have hefty health pools (and while I found the fight to be a fantastic spectacle, I do understand complaints about The Dancer's fairly trivial first phase feeling like an annoying thing to have to repeat to get to the really challenging second phase. I guess a decade of FromSoft games has made me more tolerant of such things. I didn't even known you could skip cutscenes in Bloodborne on my first playthrough, so I watched the mid-fight cutscene in Ludwig the Accursed/Ludwig the Holy Blade in its entirety about thirty times before I got him down. At least the music cue that follows is perhaps the most glorious bit of music design in all of gaming).
But fighting the Hiss, Mold, and... third, spoiler faction that comes later out in Manhattan, I honestly sometimes felt like the fights were over too soon, so this complaint about enemies lasting too long kind of baffled me.
The game lets you tweak its difficulty through numerous levers, giving you the option to change enemy health amounts, how much damage Dylan puts out, how much damage foes deal, etc. I didn't touch these, trusting Remedy to give me the intended experience. I did hit a point toward the end of the game where I was barely ever dying (indeed, by about a third of the way in, I probably only died to non-boss foes maybe three times) so if anything, I could have turned the difficulty up, but I didn't feel the need to.
So, what is my advice?
Let's start with the basics: rules that some players don't seem to have gleaned, but are right there in the game's UI if you pay attention.
First off: get every upgrade you can for the Aberrant, even with forms that you don't use. Every upgrade you get will increase the overall damage and Falter that the Aberrant deals, so ideally by the time you finish the game, you should have nearly every form's tree filled out. The Primary forms will give you a larger boost, so unless you really want to get more of a secondary form or combo finisher (for example, I used Crush, the massive hammer for my main secondary form, but invested heavily in the Drill one because Mold enemies are resistant to Crush's damage, so I would have an option to switch to) the first place to put upgrades for unused forms is in Primary. By the end of the game I had all three Primary and Secondary forms fully upgraded, and I think two combo finishers while the others had all but their final or penultimate upgrades. I suspect that if you really scour the world for absolutely every resource you can get, you can probably get all of these upgrades, but more realistically, you'll just have a few more to grab in NG+.
Second off: managing your Power is key. Your Power meter actually works similarly to how Jesse's did in the first game, as well as the Service Weapon's ammo, which is that if you fully deplete it, it takes longer to start recharging. Now, unlike in the first game, where the recharge on your Power simply took time, you'll now get more of it back by attacking foes. But just as you should try not to run out of Power, you'll also want to make sure you're using it. Combat Abilities (the magic powers you get off of the Resonant bosses, with the exception of the last one, whose thing works differently) can be very good for dealing damage and Falter, and so if you ignore these and just use your weapon attacks, you're leaving a ton of damage output on the table. Try to make sure you don't "cap" your power in combat, or if you do, be sure to start using it ASAP, even as you let off the gas once you see that you're getting close to running out.
Now, what powers you actually take can vary widely depending on your choices on your run of the game. Personally, I found that the Ignite power was really strong, and also sort of the most straightforward to manage, as it's basically a buff you put on yourself, causing your attacks to deal fire damage and build up the burn status effect on foes, while slowly draining your power. Just activating that when combat starts and then turning it off when you're about to run out of power (something you can do even in the middle of an execution animation, which is a great time to do so because that's when your damage output no longer matters). But combat abilities in general are going to be pretty powerful, which is why you have a resource to manage with them.
Ok, now, beyond these bits of "here's what the game did actually tell you, but you might have missed" things, let me talk about strategy.
Executions are the best way to make it through combat, so building up Falter key priority. The reason is that the first talent point you get, you must invest in Dominance, which gives you a brief buff after executing a foe that wildly, massively increases the damage you deal as well as the health resources that enemies drop. Not only does an execution mean the enemy you're fighting is dead, but this buff will let you tear through its buddies. Thus, I will start a fight by prioritizing Falter build-up rather than raw damage.
How do we do that? Well, Primary form attacks don't actually build any Falter on their own. Thus, we have a couple things we'll want to do either instead or along with them. We can just use our Secondary forms, making heavy attacks. Ironically, this might wind up putting out too much damage and kill our foes before we can actually execute them, though it depends on the enemy. Combo Finishers, depending on which ones you get, can also deal a lot of Falter to foes. In my experience, though, a combination of heavy attacks and combat abilities tends to be the best option for filling that yellow bar asap.
Dominance, though, only buffs secondary attacks by 50%, while it buffs primary form attacks by 100%. Thus, once you get the buff (you'll hear the Board do its weird belch/cheer/whatever sound it's making) you want to spend those couple of seconds whacking all nearby enemies with your primary attacks (I picked the Glaive as my first primary form and mostly stuck to it, meaning I could often hit several drones and even often multiple heavies with these super-charged attacks).
Now, who do we go for?
While I don't know if this was the intended combat rhythm, I found that ignoring Drones and just charging straight for the Heavies wound up being a very effective strategy. Drones are annoying, but as long as you're diligent about dodging incoming attacks and moving fast, they're minor enough that you can avoid them. Instead, once you execute a Heavy foe, swiftly killing nearby Drones with Dominance will not only go very quickly but also give you a lot of healing resources.
You need to kill the Heavies to actually bring a fight to an end, as Drones will endlessly respawn otherwise, so it's most efficient to just take them down ASAP and then clean up the Drones afterward. If you find yourself low on health, you can take out some Drones to get a bit of healing, but I really think going straight for the big guys is your best call.
Now, some specific suggestions: I took the Uppercut Surge combo finisher as my first, and this wound up being a strong choice. You can more or less keep a foe stun-locked by spamming your attacks with this, and because you and the foe are launched into the air, it becomes harder for other enemies to hit you while you're doing it. By late-game, it also does pretty enormous Falter to the foe, which is what we're trying to do. It's not as ideal for bosses, though, which tend to be immune to this sort of stunning or even forced movement, so you might want to pick up something a little more focused on just damage output (bosses can take Falter, but filling the meter just gives you a brief window of bonus damage, which is something I think I only ever accomplished on the final Resonant).
My last little bit of advice is that, while you get a clear benefit from investing in multiple Aberrant forms, it's also good to change up your loadout for the situation at hand. You can literally do this mid-combat, as long as you don't pause while in the middle of an actual weapon swing (sometimes you have to wait a second or two after for the game to decide you're finished). For example, my default was to go with Glaive, Crush, and Spin Edge, but I'd swap Crush out for Drill when fighting Mold and swap Glaive out for Strike and Spin Edge for Wide Edge when fighting bosses (and then also kind of went back to Uppercut Surge in general when I realized how much Falter it did in comparison).
Likewise, swapping Artifacts can be very helpful depending on your situation, so try to craft as many of these as you can.
Playing this way, I found my experience as Dylan Faden to really reflect the awesome power he has in-story, and no combat felt like it dragged on too long.
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