FBC: Firebreak

We burst into the Federal Bureau of Control building like rag-tag Ghostbusters dressed in hand-me-downs. We’re not beard-oil operators with ball caps and wrap-around shades. We look more like wildland firefighters: helmeted, soot-smudged, and ready to pounce on the paranormal with whatever tools we can haul off the truck. There’s a Samurai, a Grease Monkey, and a Firebreaker. We came here to chew bubblegum and kick out the Hiss. And this cursed building never runs out of Hiss.

FBC: Firebreak is an odd duck. Which is saying something, considering this game comes from Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish studio known for Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control. FBC: Firebreak (FBC stands for Federal Bureau of Control) has direct ties to that last one, Control, one of my favorite games of 2019. Firebreak’s absurdist sci-fi isn’t always as intensely moody as Control, but its bureaucratic weirdness seeps in through every seam.

Firebreak is an online co-op first-person shooter for up to three players. Sure, you can boil the gameplay down to all the regular things shooters are known for: shooting bad guys, collecting currency, leveling up, and buying better equipment. You know, the circle of life, at least according to the Bureau’s requisitions and research teams.

So, Samurai, Grease Monkey, and Firebreaker are just three outfits you can equip. That part is purely cosmetic, and there’s an in-game market to trick them out. It’s the Crisis Kits that define each player’s role.

There’s the Fix Kit that defines one of these three roles. The player that puts on a Fix Kit gets to repair things faster than anybody else—by hitting things with a massive wrench. Later, they can deploy a mortar-launching turret mounted on an office chair. Then smash a piggy-bank that creates a coin tornado.

Then the Jump Kit. You electrocute friends and enemies alike with a CO2-powered coil puncher thing. It can rocket jump you to the second floor of a tall room, and eventually fire off a garden gnome that brings down the house with a Zeus-worthy lightning storm. The Jump Kit starts off by repairing battery-operated devices quickly, and charging up a speaker stand that plays (presumably) Finnish rock music that the Hiss all gather around—for a nuclear-sized explosion.

Splash Kit is my favorite. It comes with a crank-operated water gun that puts out fires on the ground, puts out fires on your friends since fire will kill them, and puts out fires on your enemies since fire makes them stronger. You can later modify your super soaker with a teapot augment that sends enemies up in flames (I know I just said fire makes them stronger, but apparently hot water does the opposite). Then deploy a humidifier that’ll turn any cubicle farm into a splash park.

Combat fundamentals aren’t Firebreak’s strongest suit. Oh, there are revolvers, machine guns, shotguns, and rifles. They pack enough punch as far as reducing enemies’ hit points is concerned. But they lack impact. Worst of it is when enemies swarm you and your gun is seemingly clipping right through and shooting the wall behind them instead.

Taking place in the Bureau’s embattled headquarters, Firebreak teams are deployed (at the time of this writing) to five different stages. There’s tweaking that can be done before the match starts, taking any one location from a quick 10-minute blast, to a perhaps 30-minute slog. I never timed it.

Clearance level 1, 2, or 3 takes you increasingly deeper into a stage. Each clearance level is thematically cohesive, but objectives become increasingly complex.

While you can technically play solo, Firebreak is built around cooperation. Playing alone gets old fast. Random matchmaking is tough without in-game comms. You’ll need third-party apps like Discord to coordinate. But playing with friends? That’s Firebreak’s secret sauce.

Threat can be set to Easy, Normal, Hard, or Extreme. Keep in mind that “Normal” is normal for a three-person team. Going in with only two people, or solo, makes that Normal much harder. Enemies will be dropping into your location so fast and so frequently that you’ll run out of patience before you run out of lives.

Eventually you’ll unlock Corruption levels. Corruption adds to Firebreak’s already chaotic landscape. Sometimes that means an oil slick on the floor, ready to ignite with a spark. Other times, it’s a floating traffic light that stops you in your tracks when it turns red—or summons another batch of enemies. Corruption is yet another surreal aspect of the wild and woolly world that is the Control universe.

A word of advice: Listen to the job boss talking into your earpiece. Objectives can be vague, muddy, or unintentionally misleading. One moment, your boss is explaining how to take down a Post-It Note golem; the next, you’re yelling at your co-op buddy to hose you off because you’re so plastered in sticky notes you can’t see a thing. Hearing your boss's instructions is so important that you can turn his volume up over 100 in the audio settings menu.

Again, find friends to play with, and stick together in-game. It’s easy to split the party when things get hectic. But keep lines of communication open, otherwise you’ll find yourself 100 yards away and on your own, trying to fight off a minigunner or a piggybacker, while your buddies are punching the elevator button to get the heck out of there.

Firebreak's art direction is great. And a little goofy. It’s chock full of ‘80s Cold War design flourishes, and isn’t afraid of dropping an inch of analog dust between every gear, switch, and lever. You can almost taste the lead paint.

The three outfits are neat—Samurai, Grease Monkey, and Firebreaker—and all of them can mix and match helmets, body armor, and gloves. But their cosmetics are all pretty samey. There’s an orange shirt or a blue shirt. There’s a plain apron or one spray painted with “Hiss Extinction.” You can buy guns with yellow-and-black construction stripes, or even buy a spray paint template of a skier. (I haven’t figured out what sprays are for, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.)

The industrial-tinged glam rock soundtrack feels appropriately gritty, even if I would’ve approved of a more American ‘80s sound. It’s a pretty standout audio moment, however, when the Jump Kit player drops a "BOOMbox" onto the scene and some kind of Eastern European new wave starts blaring out of the speakers. You’ll have to yell for your friends to hear you.

I hate dragging down a solid review with tech complaints, but Firebreak makes them hard to ignore. In our first co-op sessions here at Gaming Nexus, one of us was always invisible to another player. On PC, my game freezes anytime I even consider changing quality presets. I’m stuck on Ultra, even though my rig clearly can’t handle it. One of our team playing on a PS5 Pro only ever made it five minutes in before being disconnected—and hasn’t been able to connect again since. Even the credits are a stuttering mess. 

In two weeks’ time, the replayability is wearing out its welcome. Remedy has stated that it doesn’t want to turn Firebreak into the usual live-service grind. It doesn’t want to suffocate people in FOMO with daily missions and weekly rewards. It want’s people to play for a bit, then come back next season for a new map and a handful of cosmetics. Then come back the season after that for one more new map and, presumably, a few more cosmetics.

That I can do. But I haven’t even unlocked all the same-same cosmetics that are already available (not to mention the inexplicable sprays) and I already don’t feel like I’m missing out on much. There’s mission variety, despite having only five to rotate through. I’m just more concerned by the laughs wearing off. Not to rub it in, but the Gaming Nexus crew is a pretty enthusiastic set of folks to play co-op with. Whether it’s R.E.P.O. or Uno, we’ll make time for each other.

But with Firebreak? Even those of us that more or less liked the game stopped making the time to log in.

FBC: Firebreak is a shooter for folks that don’t necessarily like relentless shooters. Yes, shooting is involved. But the (one) minigame to do everything else—from repairing showers to patting out fires to scooping up ammo—is tirelessly fun. While the mission objectives, like cleaning up Post-Its, zip-lining barrels into a movie theater screen-sized furnace, or playing a game of radioactive hoops with a runaway train cart, are distinct enough to not reduce every mission to “just kill everything.”

There’s variety, for sure. But there are still only five stages for now. This scenario breeds familiarity, and that familiarity breeds contempt. I’ll do anything to not play Hot Fix again. You can’t make me load another dozen barrels into that fire, especially when the heat shields around the room only half-work.

FBC: Firebreak is a good time. But only for a short time. And with the developers intentionally not putting predatory practices into their game, well, you have little to fear that you’re missing out on much of anything. There’s a fine line between demanding your audience’s time and respecting it—and Firebreak seems content to let me play a little, then walk away.