‘FBC: Firebreak’ Review – A Fun PvE Experience… Despite the Rough Spots [Review]

Note: Remedy has addressed some of the criticisms found in the review with a new launch update.

Remedy does an excellent job at creating worlds that feel like they could be explored forever. The combined Alan Wake / Control universe feels like a place that’s so full of unique personality, while still having blank spaces that can be filled in with new strange secrets. FBC: Firebreak, Remedy’s new co-op first-person shooter, continues to build on that foundation, throwing you back into the Oldest House to deal with new anomalies that are plaguing the Federal Bureau of Control. Even though this may seem like a perfect fit, Remedy inexperience in the genre makes this a fun but flawed foray into the PvE multiplayer space.

It’s been six years since the events of Control, and the Hiss is still running rampant through the FBC’s headquarters. You and two other players form a group of first responders called Firebreak that have cobbled together equipment to continually push back against the sinister forces that threaten our reality. A combination of traditional guns and makeshift tools, called Crisis Kits, will help you push back against the hordes of enemies that will try to prevent you from restoring function to key places in the Oldest House.

Surprisingly for the world of Control, the guns you have access to are all pretty standard, shotguns, pistols, machine guns, and the like, but the Crisis Kits, which act as your class, are where you can see the weirdness of the setting coming through. Since Firebreak is a team that goes to fix problems, all your tools will have a repair utility in addition to a combat role. The Jump Kit, which looks like a metal detector with a conductive plate at the end, can charge up unpowered electronics, the big wrench in the Fix Kit can be used to quickly repair broken panels, and the Splash Kit’s water cannon can be used to get fires under control. Each of these repair tasks can be done via a quick little QTE minigame if you lack the proper equipment, but having the right kit for the job ends up being crucial to completing tasks when the pressure is on.

Each kit has an offensive function that can stagger enemies to help with crowd control when the hordes of Hiss arrive. The water cannon does a good job of holding them back from a distance, while the wrench and electric impactor can both stun up close. They’re upgradable as well, giving each of them an added utility that enhances their usefulness. My favorite of the bunch was the Jump Kit’s boost that could launch you up in the air like a pogo stick, but the Fix Kit’s rush and the Splash Kit’s rapid fire also came in handy.

There are a couple different items that can be added to your kit as well, each with a key role on a successful mission. A devastating turret, a healing humidifier, and a boom box that draws aggro are deployable by the Fit Kit, the Splash Kit, and the Jump Kit respectively. These can be found scattered throughout the world, but the ability to deploy them at will is an important addition to each of the kits. Altered Augments can also be unlocked, giving you a wacky ultimate that builds up over the mission and deals huge damage when activated. It can take a while to earn these crucial elements of the kits, but once you’ve got all the pieces in play, it feels really great.

When you’ve got a group of people with all these unlocks, you can get some really great synergies going. Splash Kit can wet a group of enemies with a rapid fire spray, then Jump Kit can zap them all with a devastating stun to buy time for the Fix Kit to set up their turret to blast the group to pieces. Every player is equipped with a recharging Resonance Shield, but that only recharges when you are around your teammates, so balancing running ahead on your own with regrouping is important to your strategy. Sadly the game doesn’t have any in-game voice chat, which makes coordinating attacks like this with strangers a little more challenging, but it really sings when you can work with friends while voice chatting over something like Discord.

Each job has its own map that has semi-randomized elements scattered around. There will always be a shower, which heals you and helps reduce status effects, and an ammo station, which is necessary due to the limited amount of ammo you can hold. These can often start broken, requiring you to repair them before they are fully functional. There’s some fun environmental elements that come into play and can have various status effects that are associated with it. Fires, radiation, cold, and darkness can all get in your way, but your set of tools can always help you out. In addition, there’s some smart in-level solutions you can find that force you to pay attention to your surroundings. Sprinklers can be spotted on the ceilings in strategic places, which helps you if you’re on fire or need to rinse off some harmful radiation. Every level is well-constructed, feeling both like a real, lived in place and a smartly laid out space to traverse.

The missions themselves are great, all with their own unique feel, both mechanically and visually. Hot Fix sees you trying to reign in the out of control furnace by fixing a series of broken fans. Paper Chase has you running around and destroying sticky notes that have taken over an office area. Ground Control places you in a quarry where you need to blast leeches and collect the radioactive rocks that they drop. In Frequency Shift, you need to clear strange pink goo off of turbines to reactive emitters that can keep more goo from coming into our reality. Finally in Freezer Duty, you need to eliminate anomalous cold spots with the use of dangerous heating units. It’s cool to see them take weird Control premises and fit them within the framework of PvE missions in a way that makes sometimes mundane processes feel fun and fresh. Remedy has always excelled at using wild concepts and surreal tone to enhance their gameplay, and this is no exception.

These five missions can be modified in various ways, allowing you to customize the experience for the time you have. Each mission has a Clearance Level of one to three, which determines how many zones you go through. You can finish a Clearance Level 1 mission in about five to ten minutes, while a Clearance Level 3 can take around 30 to 45 minutes. The third zone usually has some sort of twist on the mission, like a boss fight or climactic encounter, that brings it to a close in an appropriately epic fashion.

In addition to Clearance Level, you can also adjust the enemy difficulty or add in Corrupted Items, weird items that float around the level and modify the gameplay. I’ve seen a gas cylinder that causes enemies to explode on death, a snare drum that speeds up enemies, and a traffic light that causes you to take damage if you get caught moving in its red light. These items can all be hunted down and eliminated with the use of a Black Rock gun, a special weapon that pops up throughout the level. The customizability of the missions is one of the smartest things that Firebreak does, allowing you to craft a job that will fit into whatever amount of time you have to play.

This does create a bit of a problem as far as how the game feels in its first few hours. In order to play the higher Clearance Levels, you’ll need to beat all the lower levels first, which means that your first impression of the game is rather short, basic missions. It’s a great idea to allow the player to familiarize themselves with the mechanics of each before going into the deep end, but in practice it makes your opening hours feel kinda inconsequential as you go through a series of under ten minute missions to be allowed to play something longer.

Progression also suffers from a similar issue, hiding a lot of the game’s cooler mechanics behind a fair bit of unlocking. During missions, you’ll pick up documents that act as the game’s currency, found either in shelters, which act as respawn points, or when they’re dropped by large named enemies that show up from time to time. Longer missions often have more opportunities for documents, and even higher level missions allow you to get some of the rarer resources.

The problem is that since you start with short missions, it takes a while before you are able to unlock a lot of the more interesting options for your kits, once again hiding some of the more impactful and fun elements of the game behind a few hours of play. It is nice to have the feeling of progressively getting better at the game as you’re playing, but the way Firebreak structures its progression makes it feel a bit like you’re just given weak weapons and tools at the beginning and have to wait until they actually become useful, rather than starting with useful and finding ways to escalate their usefulness. Once again, it’s a way that makes the first impression of the game not demonstrate what makes it shine.

One way that they give you that sense of getting better over time is the Perks system, which gives you different ways you can modify your character beyond your loadout. There’s simple things like faster reload or more grenade slots, but eventually you get more interesting options. Weird perks like bullets that cause cold, or the ability to run faster while burning all make you think more about your strategies as you get deeper into the game. Perks can also be upgraded to be resonant, which allows the effects to spread to your allies, making for some really great group dynamics.

You unlock the ability to buy perks based on your player level, but the amount of perks you can equip is based on the level of the kit you’re currently using. I really don’t love having to level up each kit individually, as it seems to punish you for trying out something new. For a game that encourages you to swap between kits to ensure a good party composition, it seems like a strange choice to gate perks like this.

With so much that you want to unlock among the various perks and weapon upgrades, I feel like you’d want to have a bit more content to play through as you grind away to get resources. Don’t get me wrong, the missions all feel great, I just feel like five might be not quite enough at launch. I know that there’s three different ways to play each of the five missions, so that’s kind of like have fifteen different missions, but it feels like the Clearance Level 3 version is the “real” mission, and all other ones are just what you do when you have less time. Remedy has said that they don’t want this game to feel like a second job that you have to constantly be playing to keep up with everything, but I’m worried that attitude may have let them settle on a smaller amount of content than they should have. There will be two more jobs coming before the end of the year, so I’m looking forward to seeing what those bring.

After playing this for the review period with random people, I got two friends together to play with on launch day, and we played for about three hours straight, with me guiding them through the early missions to help open up the game for them. When we called it a night, my buddy said “I don’t know if this game will have long legs, but that was a really great time,” and that’s kinda how I feel about FBC: Firebreak. I’m not a person who is looking for a forever game that I can keep playing over and over again to get through infinite amounts of content; I’m happy with something that I can hop on Discord with my friends every once in a while to hang out while running fun missions. This definitely will enter the rotation of our PvE games, which was growing a bit stale after months of Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K: Darktide.

As a Remedy fan, I’m glad I can explore the universe from a new perspective, even if it’s not focused on narrative or lore. I’m really glad that they are taking risks with smaller projects like this, giving experimental games to new directors within their studio. Hopefully in the coming months they’ll be able to smooth out some of the game’s rough edges and add in some killer new jobs. But even in its current state, if you need something new for a weekly game night with your friends, FBC: Firebreak is a great option, even if you end up drifting away from it for a while until the next big update.

Review code provided by publisher. FBC: Firebreak is out now on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series.

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