FBC: Firebreakis the kind of game that inherently causes a little apprehension. Developed by Remedy Entertainment, it’s an online co-op shooter from a studio primarily heralded for developing bespoke single-player experiences. That’s not reason enough to discount it outright, and in a perfect world, Remedy’s penchant for playing around with form could be just the ticket to creating a co-op shooter that stands out in a crowded market. Unfortunately,Firebreaknever quite gets there.
The premise behindFBC: Firebreakis almost straightforward.It’s essentially about putting out fires, but they aren’t always literal. Across five different multi-level stages, three players work in tandem to complete odd tasks while holding the line against enemy hordes. The brutalist environments, paranormal elements, and erratically shambling threats will feel immediately familiar tofans of Remedy’sControl, but those looking for comparable narrative engagement or convention-breaking presentation won’t find it here.
Status Effects Are The Name Of The Game
Interesting Interactions Follow A Limited Array Of Rules
WhileControlcentered its gameplay gimmicks around superpowers,FBC: Firebreakrelies more on status effect interactions. You’re free to gun down enemies with an array of underwhelming firearms, but you can also work with another player to hose them down and electrocute them. Each level also has a primary status effect to avoid, starting with fire and branching out to more esoteric alternatives like sticky notes and a mysterious pink goop. This sounds like fun on paper, but the systems don’t add up to a particularly tangible sense of variety.
Negative status effects will invariably slow you down or sap your health, a problem solved by taking a shower. It’s fun to realize that speeding down a zip line eliminates fire build-up, but less so to realize that it does the same for radiation. Across each stage,there’s much more re-flavoring than reinvention, and the way that you interact with the building blocks of the game never radically changes. Secondary side effects and interactions, like the way that fire and water affect speed, don’t feel impactful enough to make a mark.
Each of the five stages comes in three clearance levels, starting with a tutorial version and progressing to two additional iterations. While all three clearance levels of a job start in the same area and present the same basic objective, each one unlocks a new door to continue deeper.Firebreak’s potential for short sessions is a selling point, butonly the final clearance levels offer any noteworthy challenge, and only when cranked to Extreme difficulty. The other clearance levels have no selling point beyond brevity, and the ease of sleepwalking through them renders two-thirds of the purported content almost irrelevant.
FBC: Firebreak Wears Out Its Welcome
Fun For A Weekend, If That
FBC: Firebreak’s moments of inspiration come in brief flashes, and they tend to possess more visual merit than gameplay significance. The final boss of the sticky note stage and a rocket launch awaiting at the end of a slug-killing mission are both memorable set pieces, but once again, the way you handle each is all too similar. Running around repairing wires is barely engaging the first time, let alone the second.
If nothing was ever stretched beyond that second time,FBC: Firebreakcould scrape by. There’s a fundamental problem, however:the game is built around the assumption that you’ll be replaying these stages. Completing a single run of every clearance level will easily take less than five hours, and it’ll only unlock a fraction of the available upgrades. you’re able to equip a number of mundane perks, but the more interesting options are the ones that govern your interactions with enemies, and none will even be in sight after a complete run of the content.
Although Remedy has been careful not to callFirebreaka live-service game, this system feels right in line with live-service tendencies. The game desperately needs ways to up the variety, and if they existed from the start, players might be interested in replaying the underwhelming selection of levels for the fun of it.Locking these tweaks behind additional hours of repeating content minimizes that fun, instead asking players to continue in the name of drip-fed rewards.
Replayability Gives Way To Repetition
FBC: Firebreak’s Potential For Variety Is Underwhelming
FBC: Firebreak’s most generous offering for replayability is a corruption toggle, which introduces more anomalies into the stages. Corruption can only be applied to the final clearance level of each job, reinforcing the idea that the first two are essentially filler.Some corruption effects are mildly fun, like one that weakens gravity, while others can affect difficulty, like one that speeds up enemies. None that I’ve come across are enough to inject a replay with new life.
Not every online game needs to be rich with content, and one of my all-time favorites, the goofy battle royaleKnightfall, has never had more than a single map. Enjoyable repetition hinges on satisfying core mechanics and diverse possibilities, however, andFirebreakdoesn’t quite land in either regard. Gunning down mindless enemies inLeft 4 Deadwould feel more gratifying, andElden Ring: Nightreignis a fresh exampleof how to encourage interesting synergies.Updates could certainly build onFBC: Firebreak’s potential, but its launch state is anemic.
FBC: Firebreak’s Best Ideas Are Too Dilute To Shine
A Balanced Template In Need Of More Risk-Taking
I fully expect some players to master the game’s interactions and discover a more fascinating experience than I have, butFBC: Firebreakcurrently does too little to incentivize deep engagement. When playing sloppily is generally sufficient to survive on the maximum difficulty, mastery feels redundant. I’d like to see what would happen if the game ratcheted up the intensity of every status effect and interaction. Even if this made for an extremely volatile experience, it could also make the flashes of inspiration more frequent and exciting.
As it stands,FBC: Firebreakis an interesting bundle of concepts that coalesces into an underwhelming whole. While I love the idea of mounting an offensive against sticky notes, after a few runs of the job, I’ve already had my fill. The game eventually ceases to feel like much more than a slog through numbers, and the objectives drag on even in short-burst stages.FBC: Firebreak’s freewheeling ideas are locked into a systemic monotony, dampening the potential for creativity without any shock on hand to jolt it back into life.
Screen Rantwas provided with a digital PC code for the purpose of this review.
