FBC: Firebreak is the newest title from Remedy Entertainment, mostly known for Alan Wake and Control. Unlike those titles, this is a departure from the studio’s usual single-player third-person action stories. FBC: Firebreak is instead a first-person co-op shooter in the vein of Helldivers 2 or Deep Rock Galactic.

Set in their Remedy Connected Universe, FBC: Firebreak returns players to the setting of Control’s Oldest House and tasks you with handling the kinds of jobs that are beneath the super-powered director Jesse Faden. Remedy is known for experimentation, but FBC: Firebreak is a painfully safe and disappointingly paint-by-numbers fare from a studio that is best known for getting weird with it.

It is worth noting that I am a self-proclaimed Remedy fan. Their connected universes of new, weird games are some of my all-time favourites. A Control x Alan Wake crossover tattoo adorns my forearm, I have 100% of the achievements in both, and I have spent many hours discussing the implications of minor details and hidden messages within these games.

I also love a good co-op game. My boots were on the ground when Helldivers 2 launched, and I have spent hours yelling “rock and stone” in Deep Rock Galactic. For all purposes, I am within the Venn diagram Remedy is targeting with FBC: Firebreak. But all I could think as I blasted away Hiss with a revolver is, “Who is this game for?”

Tools of the trade

In FBC: Firebreak, you and your friends play as a squad of ‘Firebreakers’, volunteers working to keep the Oldest House running as it enters the sixth year of a lockdown initially started in Control. The Firebreakers come in three broad flavours, with minor additional build crafting through a large unlockable perk tree. Once fully unlocked, you have access to nine slots. Weak versions of each perk take up one slot, medium ones take two, and the most powerful ‘resonant’ perks fill three. Additionally, resonant perks grant the ability team-wide, which is a great little bit of buildcraft for people who play with a consistent co-op team.

Meanwhile, the three ‘kits’ each give you a different primary tool, utility device, and super ability. The Splash kit focuses on healing your teammates and avoiding devastating environmental effects by washing your team off with a water cannon. The Shock Kit can power up stations, lights, and devices while stunning enemies, and the Fix Kit lets you repair damaged objects and set up turrets.

Any Firebreaker can fix a panel, put out a fire, or power an object through a short minigame that involves tapping the correct order of the left and right bumpers. But you’ll be doing this game a lot, so with the correct kit, you can skip this using your tool. These kits create space for each player to occupy a unique role without suffocating you with specific responsibilities.

Each status effect and many of the utility items have interesting and unexplained interactions. For example, in the Ground Control job, you fill and push a cart with radioactive objects that will quickly kill an unsuspecting Firebreaker. But if you stand under the pustules that drop those radioactive seeds, you’ll be insulated from the effect. Experimenting to find interactions such as this, both within the jobs and within your kit is one of Firebreak’s more interesting elements. It is difficult to say how many of these interactions there are, and sadly, I think many players will miss that these exist at all.

As per my last email

Currently there are five jobs in FBC: Firebreak, each with three different lengths. Clearing the first version of a mission unlocks the sequentially longer versions, with each length a different ‘Clearance’ level. Playing a mission on a higher Clearance does not affect the difficulty, which is a separate option from the menu. Once you’ve unlocked a higher Clearance version of a mission, I don’t understand why you would run a lower version. These missions are almost entirely static, which is especially disappointing given that within the narrative, the Oldest House is supposed to have shifting walls.

The layout of the Paper Chase mission, the post-it note destroying level featured heavily in the marketing, is always the same. Playing a Clearance 3 version of any of the jobs simply sends you through the initial areas that make up the lower Clearance instances. Certain ammo and healing stations may move, but you will run through the same corridors and combat arenas each time. Certain objectives may move, but each objective and the location you complete it in are the same. Additionally, ending a mission requires backtracking through the whole mission to the elevator, quickly making each turn familiar.

It also became apparent why Paper Chase featured so prominently in the marketing. Along with having the only non-Hiss enemy, Paper Chase ends with a climactic boss fight. While many of the third areas simply continue the same objective present in the previous two locations. One mission tasks you with deploying heaters to destroy ice anomalies for the first two instances, and then with retrieving mannequins for a ski lift in the final part. While the objective technically changes, functionally it stays the same. Each portion involves carrying an item that prevents you from engaging in combat to a specific location. Cumulatively, all of this quickly gives way to repetition.

Speaking of weapons, this is another place where FBC Firebreak feels frustratingly safe. The available weapons, besides the black rock gun required for destroying altered items, are extremely standard. Two kinds of shotguns, two machine guns, a revolver, and a bolt-action rifle. As with much of FBC Firebreak, there isn’t anything wrong with most of these weapons. The shotguns send enemies flying while the revolver pierces weaker Hiss. Frustratingly, given the chaotic hordes of enemies, the bolt-action rifle felt worthless due to the slow rate of fire.

Out of control

The visual design, while not as curated as Remedy’s single-player experiences, is top-notch. Reusing assets from Control is a great use of resources, and it is a joy to get this up close and personal with The Oldest House. The same goes for the sound design. The guns are expectantly punchy, and even the ’80s throwback keyboard sound effect when typing in a room code on the menu feels thematic and distinct.

Another place where assets have been reused is the enemies. These are, for the most part, the same Hiss you fought in droves during Control. Control’s combat leveraged supernatural abilities, a shapeshifting gun, and telekinetic projectiles to create a medley of destruction. The enemies were rarely the highlight of the combat. Most of the time, it wasn’t about what you were fighting, but about how you could take out ten of them with a well-aimed high-speed filing cabinet.

FBC: Firebreak doesn’t let you throw a filing cabinet. Instead, you fire your primary weapon into hordes of largely indistinct enemies. Other reviewers and I would frequently default to ‘zombies’ because of this lack of a distinctive combat personality. The Hiss’s dissonant haunting chant, if it is present in FBC Firebreak, never once made itself known over the repeated click of my trigger. Without Jesse’s unique capabilities to engage the Hiss, their combat roles become indistinct to each other, and the wider stable of co-op shooter enemies.

In the mould

A defining feature of Remedy’s connected universe of games is narrative. At the start of this review, I mentioned that I am unsure who FBC Firebreak is for. As a Remedy fan, I was disappointed in how thin the allusions to the larger narrative were. Idle dialogue from your Firebreaker and their bosses crack inside jokes, but there is sadly little beyond this. Of course, FBC: Firebreak is a smaller project, but Remedy has always been masters at storytelling without relying on expensive cutscenes. Control and Alan Wake both feature pages and pages of text. Each heavily redacted document builds a world that ultimately feels inherently unknowable. It is a shame, then, that FBC: Firebreak doesn’t reward players with tidbits of information to expand and enrich The Oldest House.

Broadly, the technical performance was solid, although there were some puzzling minor bugs. One particularly bizarre issue was the shield recharging animation fully flashing the screen blue, which was distracting to the point of annoyance (although I was told that the developers are looking into turning this down).

As a cooperative game, FBC: Firebreak also doesn’t significantly stand out from a crowded genre. Given the thin content offering, it needed to nail the unique pitch of Remedy’s spin on this genre. Unfortunately, that never truly feels realised. The bones of the moment-to-moment gameplay are high quality, and the game ran smoothly on my admittedly powerful PC. But that is also true for many other games that are much more feature-complete.

So who, exactly, is the target audience of FBC: Firebreak? As a Remedy fan, I was let down by the weak connections to a universe I deeply adore; and as a co-op shooter player, the lack of variety quickly wore thin. FBC: Firebreak is sparingly great, but rarely bad. While not a live-service, there are promises of future updates. During this time, it could certainly develop to take advantage of Remedy’s unique universe, but for now, it is the spinoff that doesn’t quite live up to its potential to bring players into Remedy’s world of weird.