Objects of power play a crucial role in the fiction of Control, the setting for three-player co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak. In the lore, they’re archetypal artefacts that have gained strange powers. In Firebreak itself, they represent random events that can suddenly make the game’s enemies, the Hiss, more powerful for short bursts – and there’s usually enough of them that a short burst is all they need for things to get frantic quickly.
You might even say power is a major theme of this setting. Power over the control of information. The institutional power of the Federal Bureau Of Control itself, in whose brutalist, labyrinthe HQ the game is set. The power of the archetypal ideas that give the altered objects their strength. One thing you won’t be thinking about power in relation to, however, is the guns. They are, in a word or two, wilting shitlillies.
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You don’t have set classes in Firebreak, instead choosing a ‘Crisis kit’ with its own tool and upgrades. One of them, the Splash kit, gives you a huge water cannon. I love the option, but that doesn’t mean I want every gun to feel as much like a water pistol as these piddly things do. There’s only so many shotgun shells you can unload into a Hiss grunt before that overwrought kickback animation starts to feel as hammy as community theatre Shakespeare.
It’s a testament to Remedy’s penchant for making games distinct enough that they always feel like worthwhile places to spend time, then, that a flaw that should be a disqualifier for this genre – in the mode of Left 4 Dead or the more recent Darktide – didn’t stop me enjoying myself in a recent hands-on session. It’s also an issue that can be fixed. Remedy were keen to point out that the builds we played weren’t final – and that’s putting aside the fact that Firebreak, as a live service, will likely look drastically different after a few months in the wild. Something that’s harder to fix with feedback and patches, though, is the soul of a thing. Luckily, I reckon Firebreak has that sorted.
It starts with how snappy these missions are. As you play, you’ll progress to more complex, longer tiers of each job – called “clearance levels” – but at the lower end, you can be in and out in under ten minutes. The build I played had three jobs. Hot Fix felt the most standard in its objectives, having us run about and repair boilers, either with tools or rapidly trying to input commands from a string of prompts while the Hiss bore down on us. Ground Control involved gun-popping wriggling, zit-like growths to collect glowing orbs, then running back to deposit them in a cart. The waves of Hiss grow so intense, so quickly, that a simple task is all that’s needed to alchemise some chaotic, frequently buffoonish tension. On the lower difficulties at least, it’s intense without being sweaty. Feelings oscilate from panicking over barely scraping by at all times, while also laughing about just how evidently doomed you all are.
The most unmistakably Remedy of the three is Paper Chase. Left 4 Dead let you experience the terror of a zombie plague. Darktide, the grim, gothic majesty of an imperial hive city. Firebreak wants you to destroy thousands of yellow post-it notes. Your crisis kit tools seem the best at this, although lacking a giant water cannon, I was left hitting bits of paper to death with a big wrench. They are, thankfully, at least arranged in piles. The number you’ll have to destroy increases with each clearance level, and the figures seem insurmountable at first, but you can knock off a whole load at once by defeating post-it ghosts. They’re very cocky at first, until you get them down to half health, at which point they run off like Golden Axe imps, goading you to aggressively unload half the ammo from your awful, terrible, no-good shotgun into them. And finally, you’ll face off against Sticky Ricky, a post-it monstrosity who is – visually, at least – a solid shoe-in for the weirdest boss fight in videogames.
Your most useful ally in all three of these missions? A shower. Once you’ve taken the time to power it up – taking cold showers slows your movement for a bit afterward – it can wash off anything. Radiation poisoning from the glowing orbs, fire, the post-it notes that build up over your field of view, eventually consuming you. You also heal here, and near the shower is usually a station for refilling ammunition. While I’d hesitate to call Firebreak an immersive sim – although there are pages of unlocks, so I’m yet to see what the full toolkit looks like – there’s certainly a good bit of Bioshockian elemental interaction. Shoot the sprinklers then throw out an electricity grenade, that sort of thing. Anything that wears down the spongy Hiss quicker is a godsend, of course, but the sheer elemental messiness adds to the sense of chaos nicely. Everything’s on fire or soaking wet or convulsing from electricity all the time.
Chaotic, too, are the early bonus altered objects you can buy to upgrade your crisis kits. Sometimes, they’re utterly destructive, frying every Hiss close to you. Mine was a ceramic pig that attached to the end of my wrench to make it hit harder. There may well have been some nuances to this pig I failed to pick up on. As I said, there’s a lot of unlocks. There’s probably a gag about feeling short-changed by a piggybank here but I’m not taking the bait.
And, indeed, among those unlocks might be some more convincing guns. They might be the very best guns ever! But making you work to build up to that is a baffling choice when first impressions are this underwhelming. Knocking down the Hiss’s health seems like an easy partial fix to me – Firebreak thrives on the sort of entertaining messiness that means 20 weak enemies would suit it’s vibe better than 10 spongy ones. Otherwise, as varied as your abilities look to get once you’ve spent some time with Firebreak, I’m a little concerned the Oldest House will remain shaky until Remedy fix the foundations. Until then, “most interesting co-op shooter with the absolute worst guns’ is still, you know, pretty interesting.