FBC: Firebreak is an unusual game. Returning to The Oldest House from Control, but this time as a scrappy bunch of volunteer janitors, you have to confront the Hiss-controlled hordes and a slew of existential threats that are as mundane as they are potentially deadly.
If you come to it expecting a Control-themed Left 4 Dead or Vermintide, you’ll instead be confronted by something that’s rather different. It’s a little bit Helldivers in some ways, more like horde shooters in others, and with the kind of spooky shenanigans vibe that has permeated the recent wave of co-op horror games like REPO and Lethal Company. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really match up to any of these comparisons.
There’s five missions currently in the game that blend the humdrum with the otherworldly in some very imaginative ways… but it doesn’t quite break through the barrier to make them interesting to play in the long run.
Take the Paper Chase mission, where spooky sticky notes have infested a floor of The Oldest House, covering anything and everything in sight. You have to get rid of them, but the ways you can do so feel so utterly ineffectual as you either shoot them or run through and collect them on yourself – slowing you down in the process – and have to go take a shower to wash them away. That kind of idea is fed through the other stages as well, as you power up turbines, collect radioactive orbs from gloopy wall things, battle through pink…. stuff to reactivate some mechanisms.
The problem is that the structure is so formulaic, with only a small amount of randomisation to mix things up. You start with a small or medium sized area and clear/collect/fix up enough of that stage’s objective to allow access to the next area. This is larger, but now you do the same again with a bigger number to clear. It builds up to the final area which can be a boss fight, rocket launch or similar, and then you have to hustle back to the start point to extract, likely defeating a named Hiss enemy on the way.
There’s really only a handful of different enemies that you’ll encounter, which doesn’t help much with variety. Hordes of Hiss-controlled spanner guys rush you for melee, there’s gun-toting security guards, and floating office chair people for the regular bunch. They’re boosted by bomb squad guys, and then a couple of special enemies, but there’s none of the variety of Left 4 Dead’s special infected, let alone the sheer terror of a Tank appearing. You’ll have some hairy moments, especially when you’re covered in sticky notes or pink gloop, but it always feels like you can handle it by tactically retreating to healing shower stations.
At higher difficulties, you can enable Corrupted Item modifiers, throwing some haunted objects into a level that float around the areas, including a gravity-altering globe map, a snare drum that speeds up enemies, a freezing post box and plenty more. They bring some fun twists and added challenges, but they all have one solution: find the Black Rock Launcher in a safe room or at an ammo station, and then blast the heck out of it.
There’s three player classes – the Fix Kit, Jump Kit and Splash Kit – each of which has a specific and delightfully weird bit of kit, with electric prods, water cannons and fast-fixing spanners. There’s some nice synergies between them, so you can douse enemies with one class and then spark ’em up with another, and their specific additional kit and supers also have different situational uses,
Thankfully Remedy reacted quickly to initial complaints over the game’s introduction. At launch, you were really thrown in the deep end with no explanation over the weird kit classes you could choose, and were forced into a slow level unlock process playing only the first area of a stage, then the first two before the full level was available. It was…. weird. You can now just play a full stage right away, and this is the better approach.
There’s still plenty of muddled design within FBC: Firebreak, though. You unlock perks, abilities and weapon upgrades and cosmetics using research files and level-specific materials that you collect. Levelling up with XP merely unlocks perk slots on the kit you’re using, and and grants access to more perks to throw materials at. The UI for all of this is just a bit too confusing. Going back and forth between the perks research screen and loadout rearranges the icons based on what you’ve unlocked, and it took me forever to understand how to use Resonance.
Resonance is hugely powerful in this game, encouraging you to stick together to boost your team shields at the base level. Perks can also be shared with nearby allies, so you get all of the bullet boosting effects, improved survivability, repairing boosts, and so much more. But first you need to unlock a perk through its three tiers – Weak, Strong and Resonant – and then equip it at the Resonant level, taking up more perk slots to do so. Perhaps its using a controller-oriented UI with a mouse and keyboard on PC, but this took me far, far too long to actually understand. I’m completely unsurprised that Remedy has found a tiny percentage of players actually using perks at this tier.