FBC: Firebreak Review – IGN
When it was first announced that Remedy, the developer behind seminal single-player epics like Alan Wake and Control, was working on a multiplayer shooter, I was equal parts confused and excited. This is a studio with a knack for creating inimitable worlds, so revisiting one in a less expected way seemed like an intriguing experiment worth checking out. Now, after 15 hours of blasting through FBC: Firebreak’s striking levels, upgrading my loadout, and fighting off a plethora of infected monsters, I feel about as confused and excited as I did at its initial announcement. This is an imaginative jaunt that struggles to make its mark in a fiercely competitive genre, but it’s one that’s at least left me with plenty of war stories to share.
FBC takes place six years after the events of Control, and invites you back to the wonderfully strange architecture of The Oldest House under wildly different circumstances. Instead of saving the day as the reluctant director Jesse Faden, you and up to two friends control a trio of wildly underprepared first responders attending to oddball emergencies that would make even the most battle-hardened OSHA officer wince. If a sentient sticky note infestation is turning the workers into monsters, or radioactive leeches have infested a quarry and need to be thrown into a furnace on wheels that resembles Team Fortress 2’s Payload, it’s you and your team that receive the call. It’s a hard job, but someone’s gotta do it!
You thought that was it? Think again. On top of completing the task at hand, you’ll face off against the hordes of Control’s interdimensional antagonist, The Hiss, which seems to have taken up permanent residence in The Oldest House. And, on top of that, once you’ve finished your Jobsite shift, your team will also have to trek back to the elevator you arrived in and survive until it reaches your station. It seems like a lot to handle on paper, and it would be if played solo. But, with the help of two other players, these surreal tasks begin to feel like just another day at the multiplayer office – that is, if your office also includes menacing floating helmets, safe rooms and molten furnaces.
When playing as a full team, which feels like the optimal setup for FBC, each player gets to wield their own ‘Crisis Kit’, which mimics the class systems found in other cooperative shooters. There are three available, with each Kit offering a unique skill that can expedite key tasks during a job. In the sticky note-laden Jobsite, Paper Chase, using the globule-hurling Splash Kit will let you douse the yellow notes to make them more vulnerable, while someone with the Fix Kit can run around bashing the soggy slips with their trusty wrench whenever they’re not using it to fix light boxes which illuminate contaminated areas. With all that going on, the Jump Kit operator can then keep Hiss agents at bay by using their secondary fire rocket jump to fly around the map. This meant that as I dipped between roles while figuring out my favourite Kit, I always felt like a key player in my team’s success.
That’s also due in part to the fact that gunplay is mirrored across all three kits. When you start your campaign, you’ll have a choice of two weapons: a Submachine Gun and a Double-Barrel Shotgun. Both provide more than enough firepower to take down basic enemies in close-quarter duels and offer a decent introduction to FBC’s approachable but limited combat. As you get into more complex levels, you’ll naturally start to unlock increasingly powerful choices like Machine Guns, Pump Action Shotguns, or my personal favourite, the humble Revolver. The rinse and repeat process of taking out hordes of possessed office workers can feel dull at times. Fortunately, FBC’s relentless array of flashy particle effects and vibrant lighting features ensures there’s at least something striking to look at as you work through its objectives.
There aren’t too many constraints on the composition of your cohort, as you always have alternative means to completing Kit-specific tasks. That wrench might make repairs a simple button press, but they turn into a surprisingly stressful rhythm game without it, where you tap Q and E (or L1 and R1) in sequence without making errors to progress a meter. Like much of FBC, what seems straightforward is not, and the surprise here is that if you make errors while button-mashing, you take additional damage. This process starts out cute, but grows quickly tiresome in emergencies, and eventually my team negotiated our roles to include all three kits – nothing makes you miss your Splash Kit operator more than burning to death while trying to extinguish a fire they could have ousted in seconds.
As of right now, there are five total Jobsites, with each site being split into three Clearance Levels that can be completed all at once or in segments. The visual identity of each mission is wildly different and wholly unique, and beyond what I’ve mentioned already, there’s also chubby pink foam-filled turbine halls and dimly lit office spaces consumed by frost anomalies. Unfortunately as much as the chaos is exciting at first, it’s not long before you run out of new zones to take in and enemy variants to fight – which right now includes little beyond tanks, grunts, and aerial attackers. In this way, FBC can feel a little bare.
That said, the inclusion of tweakable Corruption and Difficulty levels ensures that what’s here has reasonable replayability nonetheless. Take the level Hot Fix, for example: your main job in it is to sort out malfunctioning heat fans by zapping and whacking them with the Jump and Fix Kits while someone uses the Splash Kit to keep you both from igniting – easy, right? Well, once you push the Corruption slider to the max, you’ll need to complete that task with random level modifiers popping in, like a Globe that lowers the zone’s gravity or an evil flying Stapler that wildly increases enemy health. Now your team isn’t just avoiding being burned to a crisp; you also need to make perfect shots and watch your footing, too. The addition of these Corrupted Items frequently provided a fresh challenge and delivered some unbelievably frustrating and hilarious multiplayer moments. In retrospect, I wish I’d clipped the audio of my friends screaming, “Where’s the stapler, I’ve got to kill the stapler now!”
If you find yourself in trouble when under attack, each zone is equipped with healing decontamination showers and ammunition bays where you can restock and take a beat. Though true to FBC’s chaotic modus operandi, these essential zones can falter and break, which then requires either a kits or that button pressing minigame to get them back online. The bays also move around as you revisit levels, meaning you won’t be able to rely on your memory to find safety, either. While I can appreciate that this kind of mayhem might not appeal to everyone, I found the unpredictability to be quite moreish, especially when the confusion led to flash arguments in our Discord chat. Thankfully, if – or, more likely, when – it all goes up in flames, depending on what difficulty setting you choose, you’ll have a series of lives to use before it’s actually game over.
Perhaps what’s most disappointing, however, is that while FBC is a Remedy game, it doesn’t feature the same Easter Egg-ridden worldbuilding that always intrigued me about the studio’s other games. You won’t find Alan Wake cowering in a cell or a stray note about Mr. Door – at least, not in my experience so far. That’s not to say there isn’t anything curious to gawk at, and there are hints of the tonal brilliance of the Remedy Connected Universe in the sarcastic posters and redacted notes littered around these maps, as well as the sporadic lore dumps delivered via voice over when you’re waiting in the lobby. But when I went looking for more serious depth beyond the tasks at hand, I came back disappointed. It might be the nature of the genre, but it was still a bummer when I realised investigating the nooks and crannies would never reward me with any lore or secrets, and would instead just leave me open to getting swarmed by bad guys.
Beyond moment-to-moment healing and ammo drops, you can turn the tables more permanently by investing in FBC’s approachable perk and gear upgrade trees. As you attack the primary goal for each Jobsite and explore shelters, you’ll find Lost Assets and Research Samples, which act as upgrade currencies. And, thanks to a post-launch patch (v1.2), Lost Assets are now more visible and have a lot more purchasing power than when I started playing.
I started to feel more adept in FBC once I got into a rhythm of splitting my cash between practical upgrades in the Requisition tree and passive perk upgrades in the Research tree. As a shoot first and ask questions later kind of player, FBC allowed me to specialise with upgraded weaponry and meaningful perks to match, such as the ammo-hoovering Shop Vacuum that allowed me to stock up fast as I darted between zones. What’s more, a Perk will become “Resonant” when upgraded to its maximum level, which means it applies to the other players in your party when they’re in proximity to you, allowing your once-fragile group to share the benefits of an experienced party member and overwhelm Hiss forces. Still, despite these smart ideas, FBC doesn’t ultimately have a wide enough variety of upgrades to work towards in the long term, making it feel like a dubious investment. The heart of what’s here is promising, it just lacks the scope to make a big enough impact, which is a huge shame.
FBC also relies so heavily on team dynamics and coordination that it can alienate people who are matchmaking with strangers or riding solo. During my playtime, I consistently queued up with friends with whom I’ve already established a rapport, which meant that not only could we yap about what upgrades to choose and build our arsenal together, we could also laugh and poke fun when things inevitably went wrong. Without that kind of solid social backing, FBC’s stressful, sometimes unclear objectives become frustrating kick-off points rather than communal goals.
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