In a market lousy with high fantasy action-adventures, eldritch soulslike ripoffs and near-future military shooters, it’s genuinely exciting to fight a man made out of Sticky Notes in FBC Firebreak. Finland’s Remedy Entertainment is a studio confidently accustomed to esoteric worldbuilding, and that is on fine display here in what is arguably uncharted territory — a session-based co-op shooter. Remedy is known for making Lynchian third-person narrative epics, yet here we are with a Left 4 Dead-like game that is rather light on lore.
FBC Firebreak takes place after the events of Control and tasks you and two other friends with containing anomalous scenarios that have erupted throughout The Oldest House. For those of you who haven’t played Control, The Oldest House is the headquarters of the FBC, or Federal Bureau of Control. From the outside, it’s a nondescript government building in New York, but inside, the FBC is home to the study of Altered World Events and Altered Items — basically, weird goings on that defy explanation and produce quotidian totems. Like a fridge that must be watched at all times lest it teleport away from its observer. Or a slide projector that opens pathways to alternate dimensions.
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Speaking of which, that aforementioned projector is the origin point of the varied enemies you’ll fight in FBC Firebreak. Through one of the slides, a possessive alien signal called The Hiss leaked into the real world, infecting the bureau’s workforce and imbuing them with a red glow and various paranatural abilities. As well as evil security guards, you’ll fight floating telekinetic baldies, imploded personnel and hooded chairbound turret people. Said nasties will get in your way as you strive to complete the objectives touted by FBC Firebreak’s five available Jobsites.
Before you begin a mission, you’ll have to pick from a trio of kits that provide the player with complementary tools. The Fix Kit is bestowed with a wrench that can quickly fix machinery, which is hugely helpful, as otherwise, the manual interaction is a QTE where you have to tap L1 and R1 to build a repair meter, with mistakes costing you time and health. The Jump Kit is given a kind of electrical hoover that allows them to stun enemies in place, quickly fix generators and leap around the map with its propulsion system. Finally, the Splash Kit totes a F.L.U.D.D.-like water gun that can get rid of flame hazards and clean co-op partners when they inevitably get covered in explosive gunk or vision-obscuring sticky notes.
Each Jobsite in FBC Firebreak has three clearance levels that unlock in sequence. Clearance Level 1 is relatively tame and tends to introduce you to the Jobsite’s conceit. In Freezer Duty, for example, the goal is to find and activate portable heaters to destroy deadly Frost Anomalies that debuff those in their proximity with slow movement. The Jump Kit is particularly useful here, as it can jolt the heaters into ignition with a quick zap. Meanwhile, the Fix Kit’s wrench can quickly turn on light boxes so the heaters can be found, and the Splash Kit can remove the freezing effects your crew will accumulate as they’re placing the heaters.
Clearance Level 2 of Freezer Duty is a rerun of that task in a different zone, but Clearance Level 3 sends you to a showroom version of a ski resort, where you must soothe a haunted ski lift by loading creepy mannequins onto it. Regardless of your Clearance Level, completing the objectives results in a final challenge — a jog back to the service elevator you started in, which you must defend with your life until it arrives and lets you leave. Depending on the difficulty level you’ve chosen, you’ll have a set number of lives to play with, which introduces welcome tension and forces you to communicate and strategise your way through the missions. Later down the line, you can add corruption modifiers to Level 3 jaunts, which introduce Altered Items into the fray, like an eerie Ramen Lantern that suppresses the lighting in a given zone. You can only deal with it using a special shrapnel weapon that relieves the area of its malady, and it’s better if you do so urgently.
When it all fits together with your friends in tow, FBC Firebreak is brilliant, talkative fun, buoyed by its incredible imagination. Step on too many Sticky Notes without the aid of a sprinkler or decontaminating shower, and you’ll become a Sticky Note monster that other players will have to deal with. Did I mention that the only way to properly heal in this game is a decontaminating shower? And that they’re placed sparingly throughout maps, and can break sporadically, demanding another player’s kit? The same can be said for the Ammo Stations, creating hilarious scarcity problems. Clever, clever stuff.
But I’m conscious of just how quickly I peeled through all of the available content, and what kind of grind I was looking at in the aftermath. In FBC Firebreak, progression is achieved similarly to Helldivers 2. There’s a free not-Battle Pass called the Requisition Tree, which you can progress by collecting case files in missions, dubbed Lost Assets. These assets can be found randomly in the zones, but are populated heavily in the optional shelters and on the bodies of ‘Powerful Enemy’ midbosses that appear when you summon the elevator. Purchase cosmetics, upgraded weapons and grenades with Lost Assets, and you’ll eventually unlock the next page, allowing you to get deeper into the unlockables. This is very important early on, as you start FBC Firebreak without your deployable item and your ultimate ability.
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For example, as a Jump Kit user, I was thrilled to unlock the Boombox, a deployable that can be zapped to taunt a horde of enemies and control them in the field. I would later earn my augment, a Garden Gnome projectile that you can attach to the end of your electric hoover. It charges as you play through a level, and can be shot onto the battlefield to summon a treacherous storm that devastates enemies but has to be used with caution, or it will down your entire team. Once you’ve got every aspect of your kit, the game really comes into its own. Beyond that, though, the major unlocks I can see are primarily cosmetics, as well as some higher-damage weapons, new grenade types, and eventually, an efficiency boost for my Jump Kit tool.
There’s also the Research Tree, another progression system based on perks that you can funnel your assets into. Each perk has three levels, Weak, Strong and Resonant, with the final tier allowing its effects to spread to your teammates, which is a smart way to incentivise investment and distinction between players. The initial stage of each perk costs the more readily available assets, but to upgrade them, you’ll need specialised Research Samples, which can only be found by cranking the corruption modifiers on specific Level 3 zones — you can only find ‘Viscous Strips’ at a corrupted Paper Chase jobsite, for example.
And as you complete missions and get better at doing so, the level of your kit will rise in tandem, opening up eight extra perk slots, so you will be able to conjure a meaningfully-specialised character, eventually. I’m looking forward to unlocking Black Rock Socks, which will allow me to neutralise enemies by landing from a height, a perfect synergy with my Jump Kit’s propulsion capabilities.
Let me level with you. As someone with nearly 500 hours in Left 4 Dead 2, I always have my ear to the ground when a new session-based shooter is on the way. And to be frank, I think FBC Firebreak has the sauce, especially if you’ve got a good group of mates around you. Telling my friends that they stink and need to get in the shower became a common, but existentially vital refrain. I’ve not hurt my belly from laughing this much in a long while. Stupendous capers tend to unfold naturally as you carve a path through pink goop or fish for concentrated slug barf to load into your wheeled condenser.
Going forward, I’d love to see Remedy create incentives for me to switch between the kits, as I have become quite attached to my beloved Jump Kit. More exciting cosmetics and deeper difficulty modifiers would go a long way in bolstering Firebreak’s runtime, too. In the trophies before launch, there was a reference to a ‘Terminal’ difficulty and a Clearance Level 6, but these extra pulleys aren’t available in-game. Curious, I asked about this over email, and Remedy’s Miika Huttunen was kind enough to respond:
“At one point in development, there were six Clearance Levels, and some of the difficulty levels had different names,” they said. “Unfortunately, the updated info was not changed in the achievements yet. We’re aware of the issue and it will be fixed as soon as possible. The related achievements will be retroactive, so if you’ve completed their requirements in the game as it is now, they will autocomplete for you once they are fixed.”
Risk of Rain 2’s underlying challenges (which demand you to play in a specific, sometimes unusual way to unlock new playable characters and items) stick out as a smart strategy to follow while adhering to the ripe source material. I’m fine to keep replaying what’s available in FBC Firerbreak, but increasing the creative potential of each mission I jump into would finesse the package.
You can see hints of this type of ingenuity in the achievements, like completing a level without firing a gun, but I’d love to see this concept expanded, perhaps as a venue for Remedy to fold in some more of that narrative and lorebuilding that they’re oh so good at. The world of Control is such a wellspring of imagination, and while the objective designs do well to plumb its depths, there’s so much more potential left untapped. Now that I’ve conquered the Jobsites, I’d love to explore them with the goal of understanding the game’s world a bit more, and how these emergencies have come to pass. Rattmann dens and Black Ops Zombies Easter Eggs come to mind…
I think we often fail to remember that Left 4 Dead 2 has no progression systems of note, yet the dynamics of its AI Director enable such emergent stupidity that it never really matters. While it is nowhere near the skill cap of Valve’s zombie behemoth, I am bullish on Remedy’s capability to grow FBC Firebreak into something that is at the very least competitive, especially if they nurture the community of players who will be jumping in later today. Many session-based shooters with limited launch content have thrived on the basis of repetition, and knowing that FBC Firebreak was built by a smaller team than that of Alan Wake 2 or Control, I’m happy to let them cook and enjoy the depth of what’s there already.
I’m sitting here writing this review, but realistically, all I want to do is jump back into FBC Firebreak, hunt down some Research Samples and keep climbing the perk tree to specialisation Valhalla. I want to become an unstoppable sparky janitor who laughs in the face of the rebar-clutching tanks that used to trouble me. Free updates are coming shortly with extra Jobsites to conquer, and I’m keen to build my character up to full operational potential before they land. But more than that, I’m just excited to keep playing with my friends, barking orders at eachother and chuckling at our doomed fortunes and hard-fought victories.
