Well, you can’t say Remedy don’t have range. After the screeching survival horror of Alan Wake 2 comes FBC: Firebreak, a three-person multiplayer FPS spun off from Wakeverse stablemate (and excellent action game in its own right) Control. Perspective isn’t the only thing that shifts, either, as Firebreak reframes Control’s eerie, New Weird-influenced setting as a backdrop for comedy co-op shenanigans. There will be gnomes creating lightning storms.
Back in the Oldest House, the illogically vast and currently invaded headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, Firebreakers – volunteer office drones turned underqualified field agents – gear up to do battle with whatever outdated guns and jerry-rigged tools they can find. The Firebreak initiative is as haphazard and cobbled-together a task force as you’re likely to see, and ultimately, a reflection of the game it stars in: one that’s plucky and capable of impressing, yet never quite comes together as a cohesive prospect.
Your opponents are, once again, the Hiss, Control’s resonance-based baddies who take up residence in the warped bodies of less prepared FBC staff. Deprived of that game’s desk-chucking superpowers, Firebreak’s Anti-Hiss toolbox is more mundane, with most of the firepower coming from simple firearms. The satisfaction of their shooting experience varies wildly, depending on the precise flavour of gun in use; shotguns and the hunting rifle are great fun, being boomy, weighty blasters that stagger chunkier enemies and send weaker ones airborne. The assault rifle and SMG, though? Awful. These deal about as much damage to a Hiss as a rude email, and with the pre-upgrade models especially, only fire off slightly faster.
Livening up these gunfights are Crisis Kits, Firebreak’s take on player classes, which include one unique tool, a helpful deployable, and an Altered Augment – an ultimate, basically – apiece. The latter play into the FBC’s mission statement of containing and researching artifacts that defy natural law, and conveniently, they often prove useful in a scrap. Chuck a spooky teapot on top of the Splash Kit’s water-spewing Ejector tool, for instance, and its harmless payloads become globs of melty magma; that gnome, meanwhile, is the hateful star of the electricity-focused Jump kit, whose obsession with following the nearest live creature makes it as likely to smite its user with summoned lightning as the Hiss.
That said, the tools are mainly utilities, designed to speed up janitor work like fixing machinery or extinguishing fires. That sounds boring, and it often is. But sometimes, these tools come good: at least some of the fires will be the ones engulfing your teammates, so timely dousing with the Ejector could save a life. Much of the wire-fiddling work also needs doing under the pressure of a Hiss assault wave, turning simple wrench whacks into genuine clutch plays.
The ability to apply shock and wetness at will also ties into the elemental interactions that grant Firebreak’s action a much-needed third dimension. Intentionally setting these up can be tricky, unless you’ve got teammates on mics, but the first time you lethally zap a gang of drenched Hiss with conduction-boosted chain lightning feels like you’re outsmarting the paranormal as well as out-shooting it. And I wanted to reach through my screen and hug the teammate who, seeing that our whole squad was about to perish from the heat of a possessed furnace, had the presence of mind to shoot out an overhead sprinkler, rescuing the run with an improvised shower.
Firebreak is usually content to let players discover these interactions for themselves, though the very start of your Firebreaking career arguably would benefit from a firmer helping hand. The onboarding process is not kind: with only the briefest of tooltips offering advice, it’s all too easy to launch into the opening mission (or job, as the game calls them) with little to no understanding of how all these magical contraptions work. And, just to make an even worse first impression, said job is a deflatingly straightforward matter of fixing some electrical boxes and leaving.
That’s because at first, you’ll need to not just unlock each of the five jobs by completing the preceding one, but also the full length of each job – they’re split up into three sections, or Clearance Levels – by beating the shorter, lower-level versions in order.
The idea behind this structure is that the availability of shorter missions makes Firebreak more accessible to busy types, who might not have the time or inclination to settle down for 45-minute slogs in the vein of Left 4 Dead’s campaigns or Deep Rock Galactic’s weekly Deep Dives. Noble in concept, and technically successful in practice, with most Level 1 jobs clearable in a couple of minutes and Level 2s doable in around ten.
Sadly, not all Clearance Levels are created equal. The first two are always and exclusively based around the workmanlike maintenance tasks – fixing generators, tossing radioactive orbs into a cart, shooting sticky notes and suchlike. That leaves only the third to ever offer a meaningful twist or dramatic climax, like battling an ogre made of Post-Its or launching a waste disposal rocket into space. These are invariably the highlights of any job, and so to stick to the lower Clearance Levels isn’t just to play a faster game, but a duller one as well.
Corruption effects, where an escaped artifact plays havoc on anything from player shields to gravity, could spice up the handyman simulation. My personal favourite? An anomalous snare drum that forces enemies to move and attack at hilariously exaggerated speed, as if Sam Lake accidentally sat on a Fast Forward button over at Remedy HQ. Except these too are strictly limited to Level 3 runs, hollowing out further the promise that Firebreak would be a less time-intensive take on live service.
As does, it turns out, the entire progression system. Pretty much everything requires XP tokens to unlock: perks, guns, upgraded perks, upgraded guns, and most gallingly, the deployable and Altered Augment for each kit. You don’t even get these as standard, making those early missions even more stripped-back. And, because weapon and kit upgrades are gated behind tiered pages – think the battle passes in Helldivers 2 – you’ll often end up wasting points on gear you might not even want, just to spend enough for the next page to open up.
In effect, you’ll need a lot of XP to get beyond the weakest guns and perks, once again disadvantaging those who only fancy dipping in now and then. Folk who put the hours in will indeed be rewarded, but then even with a full set of maximum Clearance levels, there are still only five job types for now. Corruption or not, Firebreak soon ends up repeating itself, quietly slipping into the grinding habits that it simultaneously claims to reject.
All of that is not to say that Firebreak is devoid of fun. There’s actually an hours-wide sweet spot, between that iffy start and the point where job fatigue kicks in, where it’s very enjoyable indeed, a gloriously “Why not?” mess of exploding piggy banks, skin-of-the-teeth monster containment, and glowing men in floating chairs hurling masonry at you. I wish it lasted longer, but it’s there.
It also helps that Firebreak inherits certain charms from Control, particularly the Oldest House itself. This was already a great vidjamagame fightspace back when we were aggressively levitating through it as Jesse Faden, and from the first-person perspective of these nameless FBC mooks, its imposing sense of brutalist enormousness is even stronger. It sometimes even pulls one of its lore-established spacial shifts, like cheekily putting a safe room on a ceiling and forcing poor Firebreakers to climb a debris ladder to open it.
Regretfully, genuine oddities like this are rare, which together with the marked tonal shift makes the Control relationship feel like a surprisingly distant one. I get why this was attempted – co-op shooters are inherently disorderly, so a lighter tone makes sense on paper. And some of the ways in which Firebreak communicates this intent are likeable in themselves, such as how the ammo station refill animation has your combat-inexperienced character frantically grabbing handfuls of loose bullets. Or how Firebreak’s version of a mobile turret is just a big pneumatic tube sat on a desk chair. That’s good design language, in a vacuum. But at least for me, a seasoned Control liker, it perhaps strays far enough from the original vibe that I can never draw too deep from a shared well of excitement.
As for the techy stuff, the public matchmaking is reasonably reliable at finding comrades to play with, especially if you’re willing to hop into Quick Play rather than fine-tuning a lobby for yourself. I have been put into a few laggy games, but that was when the matchmaking pool was comprised solely of journalists and influencers – it seems to have an easier time finding low-latency hosts now it’s been released in the wild.
Whether Firebreak can maintain a healthy supply of volunteers, however, may depend as much on its post-launch overtime work than on the game itself. As it stands, its successes are at risk of being overshadowed by a weak introductory phase and a general lightness of activities once you’ve unlocked all the jobs’ Clearance Levels. At least two more jobs are due for later this year, though those alone won’t address Firebreak’s investment-heavy progression system, weak weapons, or lack of effective onboarding.
Still, they could serve as an opportunity to de-boring the lower Clearance Levels, by replacing the simple repair tasks with more unique and substantial objectives. That would both sweeten the deal of replaying jobs for XP, and steer Firebreak back towards to the ideal of shorter deployments that are still worth playing. Would such an approach risk overstuffing a full, three-stage job? Maybe, but then this is the studio that made We Sing and the Ashtray Maze, and I’d very much like to see Firebreak gain some of that confident maximalism. Right now, it’s lacking, and not just in musical numbers.
This review is based on review code provided by the publisher.