Firefighting Simulator: Ignite

Written by Jason Dailey on 9/8/2025 for PS5  

I’ve become a massive fan of simulation games in recent years, thanks in large part to there being some truly great entries in the genre this console generation. But I admit that with simulators, perhaps more than any other genre, the quality level often reminds me of Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates analogy—you never know what you’re going to get.

I went into Firefighting Simulator: Ignite with equal parts excitement and trepidation, after being burned by the last firefighting sim I reviewed. So, which kind of chocolate is Firefighting Simulator: Ignite? One of the delicious ones, perhaps with caramel inside, and certainly not one of those nasty ones with a weird fruit filling. You know the ones. Apologies to the five people who enjoy the weird fruit-filled chocolates.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite (Ignite for short) was developed by Weltenbauer, the folks who made Construction Simulator, and published by the simulation specialists at Astragon Entertainment. In a world full of cheaply made, cash-grab simulators, I know that who made the game matters a great deal. Suffice it to say that we’re in good hands with Ignite.

The first thing you’ll do in Ignite is create your own firefighter using a basic character creator. You can select a face type, voice, and a few pieces of licensed gear. I don’t take issue with its simplicity considering that you hardly see or hear your character in the first place. Still, I had to pick the guy with the mustache, because unless you’re a female, I think being mustachioed is sort of a prerequisite. I also really wanted to type the word “mustachioed.” You can choose from a few licensed brands to outfit your firefighter with, including Fire-Dex and HAIX. Likewise, there are seven officially licensed trucks from Rosenbauer America available at launch that you progressively unlock.

Ignite features almost 40 missions to complete, including major, main, and side missions. You receive a rating of bronze, silver, or gold for each mission, depending on how well you performed. Major missions require you to complete some main and side missions before you can take them on, mostly to expose you to the types of hazards and equipment you are going to encounter on one of the mac daddy fire runs. These are paced well, with more kinds of (and more dangerous) hazards introduced each time you go on a run. You graduate from standard structure fires to electrical fires, gas fires, and more. In addition, new environmental hazards such as collapsing floors or backdrafts get introduced over time as well.

A nice tutorial system and a more robust training center back at fire headquarters do a nice job of bringing you up to speed without overwhelming. And that’s a larger point I want to make about Ignite: this is a simulator that doesn’t overdo it. It is perfectly balanced between being a video game and being a simulation. It has a proper amount of interactivity with objects that makes it feel like a sim but doesn’t make me want to throw my controller because I’m not clicking precisely enough on something. That can be a tough needle to thread, especially on console, so I applaud Ignite for doing so. And if you want to dive into the weeds, at the training center you can take part in several training situations or create your own custom scenarios.

Getting down to brass tacks, Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a joy to play. Missions are selected from a map by pulling up the game menu, or at the command room at fire HQ. After selecting one, the fire bells (more like an alarm, but not exactly) sound and your squad takes off running for their trucks. Getting to drive a fire rig to the scene is a nice, if not necessary, inclusion for a firefighting sim. As I raced through the streets of the fictional Oakridge City, I made sure to wail on the horn several times when approaching and going through an intersection. The AI citizens didn’t seem to give a damn that somewhere in town there was a fire emergency, as they often honked back at me. Rude.

After arriving on scene, if playing solo, and depending on your settings, your AI teammates will immediately spring into action. They’ll run supply and attack lines, bust doors open with the Halligan tool, fight fires, and rescue civilians. They’ll do it all, and you barely need to lift a finger for them to do so. During the first couple of missions, I was shocked at how competent my fake teammates were. These are some legit AI firefighters.

You may not appreciate their proactiveness, and if not, that’s fine—before each mission you get a prompt asking how you want the AI to work. By default, they are set to work autonomously, doing everything from start to finish, but you can change it so that they will only set up water lines once arriving on scene and then await further orders, or a third setting means they cannot do anything without you issuing a command.

With that said, I started running into some glitches after a few missions where the fire would spread from the interior to the exterior of a structure, and they couldn’t figure out what to do. Another time, I had to issue a command to a firefighter who wouldn’t stop spraying a gazebo that had been extinguished already. But overall, your squad is extremely competent.

If necessary, issuing commands is easy. You can give quick contextual commands to each squad member or the entire squad using the directional-pad buttons. Additionally, pressing the left shoulder button brings up a radial menu of more specific commands, such as “Search and Rescue” or “Extinguish Fire” if you need them to do a specific task.

I liked having smart teammates (as in real life), so I picked my spots to jump in and help where needed. I’d grab an axe off the truck to bust down walls or break windows to help ventilate smoke, rescue civilians from buildings, or hook up an extra attack hose and go fight fire if I felt like the team needed help. It is immersive and made me feel like I was managing the entire scene rather than just showing up to spray water on a fire.

I particularly enjoyed the ability to swap between first and third-person perspectives, which increased immersion even more depending on what I was doing. For instance, I liked being in third person when carrying a civilian out of a building but preferred looking through my SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) mask and sounding like Darth Vader in first-person when fighting interior fires.

My biggest issue with Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a significant bug with its online multiplayer. My co-op partner and I ran into frequent issues trying to finish missions together due to freezing and crashing. Strangely, as the session host, I was never the victim of these issues. Sometimes it would take two minutes, sometimes 10, but inevitably, my partner would breathe a massive sigh of frustration and tell me his game had frozen and subsequently crashed or kicked him yet again. We reversed the scenario, with him hosting and me joining the session and, while I never suffered crashes, I did encounter occasional, albeit brief, freezes. But when it works it works quite well.

Whatever spots you don’t fill with other humans get occupied by AI teammates, which we’ve established are insanely good firefighters. And due to its drop-in/drop-out nature, if a friend does leave (or get kicked) then the AI is there to take their place and vice versa. For the periods we were able to get it working, co-op firefighting was a good time, though. It also features cross-platform play, so you can play with pals wherever they are.

Graphically, Ignite is one of the best-looking simulators on console despite some glitches here and there. Driving to a callout and seeing the plume of smoke in the distance never got old, though there is some weird image ghosting happening while driving. In general, the fidelity surprised me for a genre that is notorious for pumping out some of the ugliest games you’ve ever seen.

Unreal Engine has done wonders for simulators in the last few years and Ignite is the latest benefactor. It includes two graphical modes: Quality and Performance. But I never saw a reason to switch from Quality to Performance. Framerate is rock solid except for a few random hiccups while driving vehicles, and the physics system is a notable standout, including the way fire, water, smoke, and water hoses move and interact with other objects. For instance, smoke billows out of windows after they’re opened, and hoses seamlessly flex around objects while you’re moving.

I encountered a few other minor issues during my time with Ignite, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a bug-squashing patch. Things like sound occasionally cutting out, finnicky aerial basket controls, and insanely small menu text, which cannot be adjusted at the time of writing. Also, I never could figure out how to change my gear despite unlocking new threads periodically. I’m sure it is done somewhere in the expansive fire headquarters, but I was unable to locate it.

Speaking of the HQ building, it is a nice design flourish, but other than selecting missions (and presumably changing gear), the massive building serves no other purpose at this point. However, the development team has already announced at least one year of post-launch support, so I’m hoping that they can add some functionality for HQ along the way.

If all the simulators in the world were in a box of chocolates, Ignite would be one of the tasty ones. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you’ve had to spit out a few gross ones along the way, too. But that burning desire for a good simulator on console is a fire I can’t put out. Like my SCBA in the middle of a raging house fire, Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a breath of fresh air for console-bound simulator fans. After some previous dumpster fires, we finally have a competent firefighting sim on both PlayStation and Xbox. It’s good, and with a little refinement, it could be great.