FBC: Firebreak Preview - Synergistic Mayhem

Remedy is well-known for being wonderfully weird, so it’s no surprise to learn that FBC: Firebreak is an exercise in using the insane to kill the horrifying demon-like Hiss. It’s mechanically dense with a lot of interconnected systems that has a few rough edges but a strong heart. 

Firebreak is set six years after the events of Control and takes you back to some iconic locations in the Oldest House. In those six years, the Hiss have done a lot to make The Oldest House home, so it’s up to you and a couple of friends to clear them out.

Firebreak is Like Left 4 Dead But a Whole Lot More

A co-op shooter made of teams of three, Firebreak will give you Left 4 Dead vibes fairly quickly when you first start to play the game. The more you understand its mechanics, however, the more you’ll come to see all they share is the hordes of enemies to contend with. 

For example, the guns in Firebreak are pretty ineffective and inefficient when it comes to killing the Hiss. You will quickly become overrun, and while there are means to keep getting ammunition more or less indefinitely, it won’t be enough. 

That’s where the special weaponry and Crisis Kits come into play. Crisis Kits are classes that come with specific weapons and tools. We had access to three but there will be five on launch. For example, the Fix Kit gives you a big wrench that lets you quickly repair things like healing stations or maybe deploy a turret mounted to a wheeled office chair that will shoot wildly at enemies. 

Utilizing the abilities and special weaponry within your kits is absolutely the key to Firebreak. As mentioned, guns will only get you so far. Even more, while the kits themselves offer a lot of firepower, their synergy is their greatest strength. 

They get more nuanced and complex than this, but an example is the synergy between the Jump Kit and the Splash Kit. The Jump Kit lets you shock enemies and the Splash Kit lets you spray enemies with water. You get the gist. 

More importantly, though, those weapons have big areas they hit and allow you to take out a huge group of enemies at once. You’ll never get that sort of efficiency with weapons. 

The funnest parts of your kit, however, come in the sort of “ultimate” abilities you get. Each kit has a SCP-like Altered Item that you can unleash on enemies. The Jump Kit lets you fire off a garden gnome that creates a massive storm that will damage anyone, including allies, caught within it. 

Overall, the kits offered up enough variety they made my experience with each mission, or Job, very different. Your role and what you contribute changes quite dramatically, so you can find the role that fits you like a glove or bounce around if you ever get tired of one. 

You Can Adjust the Difficulty to Your Liking

We had access to three different Job types in our preview, though there will be five when the game launches. All three of them were wonderfully Control-themed, with very different tasks to complete. 

Before getting into some of them specifically, all Jobs have a Clearance Level you can select, which is basically a difficulty selection. The higher the level, the more difficult enemies become, but that's not the only thing that changes.

At higher Clearance Levels, you will have more tasks to complete as well. In one, you essentially unlock a huge boss fight that you must defeat to complete the job. Additionally, there are other wrinkles like moving the ammo and healing stations to random parts of the level. On lower levels, these are always in set locations you don’t need to search for. 

To further add to the difficulty, you can adjust the Corruption Level as well. Essentially, this will add corrupted items to the Job that will modify the difficulty in some way. You’ll need to find a special item to destroy them as well. In one of my runs, we had to find a corrupted stapler in the office that doubled the health of enemies. 

One gripe some may have is in the level design. Each Job’s layout was relatively straight forward, but when a lot of combat revolves around hordes of enemies, the more open layouts with hallways makes some sense. The layouts stay the same for the Job you have each time as well. 

Firebreak's Jobs Are All Refreshingly Different

With that said, I got the feeling that the goal is to have a good variety of Jobs to complete. Each kind of Job is very different and set in an entirely unique location. 

In Hot Fix, we were tasked with repairing various systems in the furnace, Paper Chase is all about destroying a bunch of sticky notes that have covered everything (even creating monsters of sticky notes to fight), and Ground Control had us collecting radioactive pearls with a payload we pushed along the level to a launch site to send them off. 

The Jobs were varied enough with interesting goals to make each feel very distinct from the other. It is not as though each devolved into a “fend off the horde while we mash X button on Y machine,” though there’s plenty of fending off hordes while you’re trying to get something done. 

Movement and positioning yourself between the hordes of enemies and your objectives is key in every Job, but some of them force you to be on the move a whole lot more. It sounds simple when written but the varied dynamism in any one level really makes the experience quite different.

There’s even some hazards/benefits to the different levels as well. Fire is generally a bad thing in that it harms you and can make enemies do more damage, so someone using the Splash Kit can put the fire out on enemies and other players. The office building has sprinklers you can set off to get the job done as well. Keep an eye out for environmental context clues, as there were a few things that just made sense in how they worked and interacted with the rest of the game. 

The final thing to mention quickly is the upgrade system. Each Job you do, you can collect some currency in the level and will be rewarded at completion. You use that to unlock new weapons, upgrade weapons, cosmetics, perks, etc. 

Perks aside, the rest are set up in a very Battle Pass-like way. Not that there is one necessarily, but it’s a familiar looking way to get upgrades. 

Perks use the same currencies, and you can have up to 9 at once, all of which are upgradeable to more powerful versions as well. This is where you’ll be able to fine tune a build to what you want. 

There will also be premium cosmetic items only available through purchase.

Firebreak's UI Can Be Confusing and Unwieldy

Most of my gripes with the game come from the UI and just how little is explained to you. Granted, our preview session gave us access to way more than you’ll get at the start of the game, so it was a little bit of an information overload. We were also told that they’ve already made significant UI changes from the build we played as well. 

Things like the menus were difficult to navigate and sometimes it was hard to see what was going on or where to go on screen with just how much was going on. Hopefully there will be some nice changes there. 

The ineffectiveness and lack of real weight behind any of the guns may be a big turn-off for some people, too. My first hour or so with the game, I was certainly feeling that. So many enemies felt like a bullet sponge, but it wasn’t until the other mechanics clicked that I felt I was able to make progress. 

Nevertheless, the gunplay felt light and lacking impact. I’m sure there will be some builds and upgrades to make them more useful, but Firebreak is definitely more about the various special weapons and tools you get access to in any one Kit.  

FBC: Firebreak Preview | Final Thoughts

I think there’s enough here to be cautiously optimistic about FBC: Firebreak but who knows the future of the game. The gameplay systems are fun, engaging, and unique, and the Jobs offer some great variety. But are 5 different mission types, each with their own unique but unchanging level, enough? Does the $40 price tag create too much of a barrier even if there aren’t the usual free-to-play trappings to churn through?  

It’s impossible to predict the future of these sorts of games, but I think Remedy has put forth an interesting effort that people should enjoy.