Control Stealth-Drops on iPhone and iPad for $5

Five dollars. That's what Remedy is charging for one of the best action games of the last decade, reworked from scratch for touchscreens, with all DLC included. No subscription required, no free-to-play hooks, no battle pass. Just the full game for less than a coffee.

Remedy confirmed on Bluesky that Control Ultimate Edition has launched on the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, built specifically for mobile rather than being a lazy port of the existing console version. The studio says it has reworked touch controls, redesigned the in-game UI, and even adjusted gameplay mechanics like aiming and puzzles to feel native on smaller screens. According to the game's App Store listing, it also supports ray tracing on compatible hardware, which is a wild sentence to write about a phone game.

Control originally launched in 2019 and follows Jesse Faden as she enters the Oldest House, a brutalist nightmare of a building that serves as the headquarters of a secret government agency investigating supernatural phenomena. The game blends third-person shooting with telekinetic powers, letting you rip chunks of concrete out of walls and hurl them at enemies while floating through collapsing office spaces. It was a visual showcase on PC and consoles, and the idea that it's now running on an iPhone with ray tracing is either a to how far mobile hardware has come or a recipe for melting your battery. Probably both.

$4.99 for Everything

I want to stress how unusual this pricing is. Control Ultimate Edition includes the base game plus both expansions, The Foundation and AWE. On PlayStation and Xbox, this package still sells for significantly more. Mobile ports of major games tend to either charge a premium or, more commonly, go free-to-play with aggressive monetisation layered on top. Remedy did neither. Five bucks, all content, done.

This is how you bring a game to a new platform. No caveats, no asterisks, no "starter edition" that gates half the content behind additional purchases. In a mobile market drowning in predatory monetisation, charging a flat fee for a complete experience feels almost radical. I wish more studios had the nerve to do this instead of treating every mobile release as a live-service revenue stream.

The bigger question is performance. Control was demanding enough on dedicated gaming hardware at launch. Previous versions of the Ultimate Edition on other platforms had documented issues with ray tracing causing stutters and rendering errors, and it's unclear whether those problems carry over to the iOS build. The App Store listing specifies "supported hardware" for ray tracing, so older iPhones and iPads likely won't have access to that feature. No gameplay footage was available at the time of the announcement, though Remedy indicated videos would follow shortly.

The timing is interesting too. Remedy is deep in development on Control Resonant, the direct sequel that was shown off during State of Play earlier this year. That game moves the action out of the Oldest House and into a warped version of Manhattan overtaken by supernatural forces. Dropping the original game on mobile for almost nothing feels like a smart way to pull new players into the universe before the sequel arrives, and it's a far more consumer-friendly approach than, say, locking the original behind a subscription or bundling it with a pre-order.

Control Ultimate Edition on iOS joins a growing list of full console and PC games making the jump to Apple devices, but few have done it at this price point with this level of rework. Remedy says the changes go beyond just slapping virtual buttons on the screen, extending to how puzzles function and how the interface scales across different display sizes. If the performance holds up, this could quietly be one of the best deals in mobile gaming.

Control Ultimate Edition is available now on the App Store for $4.99, and is also playable on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Mac.