FBC: Firebreak Is the Return to Left 4 Dead Style Shooters I’ve Been Craving
Hitting the right notes.
One of my core gaming memories as a teenager is being hunched over my PC until 4AM, spending eight hours straight on runs of Left 4 Dead with my group of friends. Left 4 Dead’s unique blend of co-op and horde survival was literally infectious, and although other games have tried, nothing in the decades since has been able to scratch that same itch. But now it feels like something might finally fill that niche — FBC: Firebreak is the kind of wonderfully chaotic shooter that I can see myself playing until those early morning hours. The mechanics and foundation are all there, and the wonderfully weird of Remedy’s Control is just the icing on top.
Inverse had the chance to play roughly three hours of the co-op shooter, and experiencing three of its different “jobs.”
FBC: Firebreak is the first multiplayer game developed by Remedy Entertainment, the makers of Control and Alan Wake 2. To that point, Firebreak is set in the same universe as Control, taking place six years after that game. As the supernatural entity known as The Hiss has taken over the Federal Bureau of Control’s headquarters, it’s up to small three-person teams known as Firebreak to combat the threat.
The first hour or so of my hands-on was admittedly a little perplexing — my team struggled to get anything done and figure out how to work together in synergy. But after that first hour something suddenly clicked, we experimented more with our individual kits, each filled an individual role, and got the hand of the mechanics and core structure of the game.
For those next two hours, I can only describe what played out as controlled chaos. Me and my team yelling out the locations of items and Hiss, madly dashing through levels to try and escape as literally dozens upon dozens of Hiss chased us. It was bewildering and thrilling all at once, but what’s most remarkable is the amount of depth it feels like Firebreak has — how much more I wanted to dig into everything.
Each match in Firebreak is themed as a different “job” for your team, with each one having some kind of unique gimmick and objective for your team. We had the chance to play through three different jobs, each of which felt markedly different.
Paper Chase tasked the team with destroying sentient stick notes infecting an area. The notes would whip up and occasionally obstruct your view, but also transform into terrifying paper monsters. This is where some of the environment effects really shone through, as anything water-based would soak the note monsters and drastically slow them down.
Safe rooms give your team a place to respawn, while fixing showers gives you a healing spot.
The second job, “Hot Fix,” had my team travelling through a wing of The Oldest House to fix a furnace, contending with random fires that would break out while trying to fix hit transfer fans. A loadout with water was absolutely essential here, and it all culminated in a massive showdown in the furnace, where we had to throw barrels in to cool things down while fending off waves of enemies.
Finally, “Ground Control” had my team pushing along a cart in the mines, searching for rare pearls in the pods of Astral Leeches. The only catch is there’s hundreds of leeches, so we needed to find the pearls, load them on the cart, and then quickly get out of dodge.
While the full game will have five jobs at launch, these three along provided a wide array of content. Paper Chase was my personal favorite because of the sheer absurdity of everything, but the real crowning moment comes when you complete any of these jobs. That’s when you have to get back to the elevator and make your escape, and it’s exactly when all hell broke loose, every time.
While each job has its own fun emergent moments, that final made dash had some of the most thrilling moments I’ve experience in shooters in years. It’s an explosive symphony that can lead to dramatic moments, like the whole team loading up in the elevators only for the doors to get caught on one of us and send a flood of Hiss inside.
There’s more variation layered in with two unique setting alter how long these jobs can be and how difficult they are. Threat Level increases the frequency and aggression of the Hiss. Higher levels mean your team will face more resistance completing objectives. Meanwhile, Clearance Level determines the amount of areas the job contains. A Clearance Level of one means you only have one area and the job should be over in 5-10 minutes. But each Clearance Level adds on another area, meaning your resources will be spread thinner and you’ll have to endure the Hiss’ assault longer.
What’s really interesting, however, is that you can’t actually fail any objectives. Success or failure is entirely based on if you survive the Hiss during a job, and the faster you complete objectives the more rewards you get. It’s a nice risk-reward system that adds some different stakes to this kind of shooter, and really encourages cooperation.
This core design is supported by a robust set of loadout options that provide a ton of variation for your team, and a progression system that feels satisfying. You have your selection of weapons like machine guns, revolvers, and shotguns, but each player also brings a Crisis Kit along.
There are three kits currently: the Jump Kit gives you a electric tool that can jump mechanic items and shock enemies, the Fix Kit gives you a massive wrench that can repair machines and whack enemies, and the Splash Kit gives you a water cannon that puts out fires and soaks enemies to slow them down. Then on top of that, each of these kits have unlockable bonus tools, like a Swivel Turret, and hilarious Altered Augments, such as a “Garden Gnome” that launches a paranatural storm.
There’s some really smart synergy between kits enhances your strategic options. My team found out that wetting a few enemies with the Splash Kit would make the Jump Kit drastically more deadly, and suddenly we were shocking thirty enemies at once and seeing them fall like dominoes.
Each Job you do, whether you complete it or not, rewards you with Requisition Points, and finding hidden files in each Job can reward you with even more. This means you’re constantly unlocking new loadout options at a steady clip, no matter how well you and your team is actually doing.
That’s what I felt was most important about Firebreak right off the bat, how it respects the player’s time. Whether you’re good at shooters or not, the design of these jobs, and their unique mechanics, means you can always contribute to your team and get rewarded for doing so. At the same time, the progression system means you’re almost always on the cusp of unlocking something, and being able to test new strategies and team compositions.
The amount of enemies thrown at you can get hilariously overwhelming, when 30-40 Hiss are all trying to take a bit out of you.
These design elements, coupled with Remedy’s commitment to all post-launch content being free, gives me a lot of confidence in the kind of experience Firebreak is trying to provide, where you can jump in, play, and have fun — whether it’s for one hour or ten. Everything about this game feels like its leaning into that unique angle, and the idea that you don’t have to commit 100 hours to get something worthwhile from it. That alone has me interested.
The extra wrinkle here is Firebreak’s fantastic visual design and aesthetic, which absolutely drips with atmosphere and personality — just like Control. There’s also a greater emphasis on the comedy of this world, with lots of character banter. My favorite little detail is when “boss” enemies appear in the middle of levels with the most generic name you’ve ever heard, forcing you to take down a fearsome foe named Bob.
FBC: Firebreak feels like it has all the elements of something that could be great, and Remedy has already proven time and again that it has the chops to make superbly unique action games. The big lingering question now is if the post-launch support can keep interest up, or if Firebreak is going to be a flash in the pan.
