As a fan of the “Remedy-verse”, with Control being one of my favorite games of the last decade, I was leery but intrigued by the first looks of FBC: Firebreak. Announced at the Xbox Partner Preview in October 2024, Firebreak looked like an interesting new, less serious return to the Oldest House this time as a maintenance crew that has to keep the facilities running.

A quick overview, FBC: Firebreak is a first-person, cooperative PvE shooter with maps (or “jobs” as they’ll further be known as) containing a variety of small objectives that increase based on your “Clearance Level”. The whole while doing these objectives, your crew has to also fight off hordes of the Hiss who will stop at nothing to stop you, similar to a Left 4 Dead or similar game. 

The jobs you can take are as follows:

Hot Fix
The first job you’ll do sends the Firebreak team into the furnace area of the Oldest House, which is out of control due to the cooling systems failing and the furnace is consistently spewing flares of intense heat. The objectives require you to fix a variety of the cooling fans in the stage through the first two clearance areas leading up to cooling down the furnace itself. The stage is a solid introduction to the basic mechanics and promotes satisfying teamwork moments when you actually can find a team that works together.

Paper Trail
The first real “Control” feeling job, you’re tasked with destroying Post-It notes that have taken over the whole floor, turning FBC agents into Shufflers. For two Clearance Levels, you’re shooting at the walls for half-an-hour with whatever you have to try to destroy as many notes as you can. Notable due to being the only job with an actual boss fight, a monstrous golem of Post-It notes named Sticky Ricky.

Ground Control
Hope you like shooting walls, again! The crew needs to collect radioactive pearls from leeches, fill a container with them and load the container into a rocket. Possibly my least favorite job; radioactivity sucks, shooting the walls is boring and the end is just waiting until the rocket leaves. Also, the quarry is just kind of a boring looking environment.

Frequency Shift
Easily my favorite job visually, the Firebreak team needs to reset frequency transmitters to expel the pink exogenic mass that has taken over. Each Clearance Level is the exact same: find transmitters, fix panels and clear the turbines to get them running again. Not horrible but the lack of a true climax in the third Clearance Level makes it feel unimportant in a way the others don’t.

Freezer Duty
The current “last” job on the board sees the team working their way up to the Condor Ascender Ski Lift in order to feed it mannequins, all the while clearing out frost anomalies that have overrun the floor. While this was my least favorite for some time, it’s also one that can be done quite quickly if you have a team working to ensure all anomalies are spotted and set up to be destroyed at the same time. I’ve come around on it.

To do the jobs listed, the Firebreak team is able to enlist one of three kits (this game’s version of classes) that have various loadouts to make the jobs easier or go faster. Each kit comes with a tool, a defensive item and an Augmented Item. They are:

Fix Kit
Equipped with a wrench to fix damaged equipment, the Fix Kit is invaluable in almost every mission as every job has multiple items that require repair, including ammo and shower stations and light breakers. With the secondary being a dash to quickly move around, using a Fix Kit means you can dart around a stage doing objectives while your team struggles to keep up and clear the waves you run by. Their defensive item is a cannon turret that does a large amount of damage to enemies in it’s sight and the AI16 Piggy Bank turns your wrench’s melee into a tornado of coins that damages any enemies that run into it.

Jump Kit
The Jump Kit comes with a Electro Kinetic Charge Impactor, which is a fancy title for a gun that shoot out a cylinder that also shocks items it hits. While not necessarily used in every circumstance, the tool also allows the user to jump further to reach higher spots and make stunning large enemies easy for the team to finish off. It also works well in water to shock everything wet in the vicinity at the same time. Their defensive item is a Boombox speaker that, when powered up, draws enemy attention to attack it and explodes causing massive damage in an area around it. The AI19 Garden Gnome Altered Augment shoots a gnome out that runs back to its owner, bringing a massive thunderstorm of lightning in its path (and usually killing its owner, so beware).

Splash Kit
The third and final kit comes with a Cranking Operated Fluidic Ejector, basically a water gun that can shoot globs of water (that can be charged for bigger globs) or machine-gun out droplets to quickly put out fires. While this tool never actually helps in the objectives, it’s invaluable to have in the group as every mission has moments where fire causes paths to be closed off, your teammates being set on fire or to wet a large area to allow the Jump Kit to shock. Their defensive item is a Humidifier, an item that when filled with water from the Ejector will sprinkle water out in an area around it, causing negative status effects on players to be washed away and also heal over time, making the Splash Kit the only full support role in the game currently. The altered item is the AI44 Teapot that, when attached to your Ejector, causes the fluid to be liquid magma, ostensibly turning it into a flamethrower that causes massive damage initially and over time to anything hit by it.

One of the things I think I enjoy most, being set in this universe, is how the tools are basic enough to feel like they have real-life sensibilities when used for objectives but can be turned into Object of Power to turn the tides of battle in your favor using altered items as the in-game reason. A simple wrench being turned into a tornado causing magic item by strapping a piggy bank onto it, or a teapot turning a water hose into a flamethrower is the exact sort of goofy, paranormal accoutrements I expect to see from a game set in Control and they do not disappoint. 

On this topic as well, every job has the option to turn on Corrupted Items which will spawn an Object of Power on each Clearance Level, causing a new effect on the gameplay. I won’t go into all of them here but some of these include a stapler that causes all enemies to have increased health, a traffic light that does massive damage to the group if it’s on RED and a snare drum that can increase the speed enemies move and attack. These add a sense of urgency (in most cases) to find the item and destroy it as these effects can be extremely detrimental to the group.

Another positive I have of the game is just how well a group that knows what they’re doing can get through a job with the right balance of kits, good weapons and some teamwork. Finding a group where everyone knows their job, executes quickly and efficiently and helps each other out gives a similar satisfaction of end-game raiding in an MMO. There is nothing quite like working together in a game to accomplish that which can barely be done by a single player effectively and, when firing on all cylinders, Firebreak is extremely satisfying.

But this is where I start to also have issues. FBC: Firebreak is a cooperative experience and the game offers no good form of communication with your own team. There are a couple of voice lines, sprays and contextual pings you can use but if you have something you want to tell your teammates, you’re out of luck. At this point now, I can barely get by with groups of random players using these built in options let alone the countless hours playing with newbies that I had to endure their foolishness and waste my time by no fault of theirs (they’re new, they don’t know) but rather because Remedy decided they didn’t want to give me the option to chat with them. I understand how toxic online multiplayer can be (hell, I’m just as bad most of the time) but to not even give the option to people who want to be able to chat in text or voice is just pathetic. Even for me, I would have learned much more quickly if when I began my teammates could help direct where I should go or we could make a plan. To not even give the option to team chat for a cooperative game is stupid, and they should feel bad.

There are also a variety of issues I had starting the game that have luckily been fixed since. Even so, I would be remiss to not mention them as they did color my initial impressions and experience. 

At first, every job required you to beat the previous Clearance Level to unlock the next, and every job at Clearance Level 3 would also unlock Corrupted Items and the next job. This meant that when I started playing, I had to play Hot Fix, for example, three times in a row before I would have access to Paper Trail, and then the same until Ground Control, etc. This caused me to quickly burn-out on each job in the first day almost immediately, especially because many of the Clearance Levels don’t change the objective very much if at all. Thankfully, this was changed just two or three days after in an emergency patch that unlocked all jobs at Clearance Level 3 once available, making it much easier to choose what you wanted to play quicker.

This patch also changed one of the biggest errors in judgement the game shipped with: the first progression tree. On release, all items were released in a single “battle pass” like progression tree that required you to spend Lost Assets on each page to unlock the next with better items. For example: if you wanted the second tier of submachine gun, it might be on page three, requiring you to waste maybe 60-90 assets on garbage that you wouldn’t want otherwise just to unlock the third page where you could now potentially get the weapon you wanted. This caused upgrading to a weapon that wasn’t complete garbage (which all the starting ones are, by the way) much longer and grind-ier than warranted. This was changed so that all meaningful progression unlocks had their own skill tree and silly aesthetic things like skins and sprays were relegated to another.

I think my main issue with the game in general, as of today, is that FBC: Firebreak just kind of feels… empty. Five jobs and three kits are just not enough to justify how much grind there actually is in the game. At a bit over 24 hours playtime, I am still working on unlocking all the perks and cosmetics, albeit I have fully upgraded all three kits and reached current max level (49). This was done because I am a sick human being and I crave seeing small numbers go up while I listen to podcasts, not because I necessarily am having much fun anymore. The only fun I truly get is when I play with Nathan or I find a group where we all mesh together and get through a job in record time, something that feels impossible most of the time. 

It’s also incredibly disappointing how little reference or easter eggs there are pointing back to Control. There is almost no mention of the characters from that game (even though the main one runs the whole building), there are criminally few lore-based moments or dumps, there is only one true “boss fight” that feels like the source material… it feels like a game that a third-party studio would put out that wasn’t allowed to make direct reference to Control. There is so much potential for fun callbacks and ideas that just seem like missed opportunities currently.

Just for the love of God, let me talk to my teammates so I don’t have to write them up again.

(See Nathan’s response and opinions here: https://pixel-response.com/on-the-other-handmy-take-on-fbc-firebreak/)