The live-service genre has gained massive traction and appeal over the past few years—it earns developers and publishers substantial paychecks while becoming a new hobby-based title for players. As long as the game’s ecosystem remains thriving, it’s a recipe for success.
However, that same live-service model has been both a blessing and a curse to the multiplayer genre. A certain multi-billion-dollar company planned its annual releases around this structure,which ultimately led to one of the most disastrous multiplayer GaaS flops of the modern era.
FBC Firebreak Gets Steam Deck Approved Badge
You can officially play Remedy’s upcoming co-op shooter on the go.
Sure, you’ve got successful bangers that thrive off of a healthy update cycle, likeHelldivers 2andFinal Fantasy 14, but is there any room for more titles that offer simplicity and a pick-up-and-play basis? Well, that’s whereRemedy Entertainment’sFBC: Firebreak enters the fray.
It’s their answer to a live-service game that restricts itself from traditional traits plaguing the genre and offers an arcade-like experience where you’re able to easily jump into it to play with buddies. There’s zero room to feel any FOMO with customizable flexibility regarding the gameplay.
It certainly felt like a surprise to play, especially after my experiences with their rich single-player catalog of titles. But just how well does Firebreak bode in comparison, even with its familiar setting as Control? And does it manage to keep you invested in its gameplay loop? Well, it isn’t all perfect, but the guys at Remedy did their homework with this one.
Hissing Noises In The Oldest House
I’ll be upfront with this one; to anyone who’s expecting this game to be a teaser for what Control 2 is going to offer us or anythingrelated to that game’s lore, it’d be wise to shut those thoughts down entirely, because although you’ve got the Oldest House here, FBC Firebreak is intended to be its own shebang.
At best, the only pieces of narrative to be found in this game co-exist within the comical banter between the Firebreak crew and their operations' strategist, Hank, as well as the other workers who manage this whole charade unfolding once again in the Federal Bureau of Control’s organization. It’s not anything extraordinarily entertaining, but at least it adds enough weight to make this whole fiasco seem intriguing.
There’s also no such thing as those collectibles found in Control, where you get bite-sized and fragmentary-like information about ongoing events. This is strictly just your Firebreak crew diving headfirst into the hiss-infected sectors of the Oldest House on various jobs and clearing each of their zones out without going MIA.
You won’t have to worry about missing any live events, battle passes, or a shiny new piece of overpowered gear being available for a limited time.
And speaking of those sectors, if you’ve played enough Control like me, you’ll likely recognize most of these sectors even though they’re presented in the updated Northlight engine and have a redesigned visual than their original counterparts. There’s the maintenance sector’s furnace area in the Hotfix job, and even the Black Rock Quarry makes a return here.
It’s honestly the exact abstract and otherworldly place we all remember from Control, still constantly shifting around and crawling with the Hiss-possessed humans and abominations that are out in high numbers this time to hunt your squad down. It’s also the same Hiss we battled as Jesse, so don’t go expecting any substantial enemy variety here.
There’s your occasional trash fodder horde that can quickly gang up on you with their large numbers, the brutes who can chuck out explosives and mow you down with their machine guns, as well as the special ones, such as the Distorted Hiss and the stationary Hiss Cluster spheres. They all make their presence felt here to give you the complete package of thehorrors in the Oldest House.
Not A Loop Nor Any Spiral
A part of what makes a multiplayer game feel engaging to me is the gameplay loop. Or, if its RPG elements (if present) continue to evolve and expand, which in turn adds more incentives. However, this discussion ultimately falls back into the rabbit hole of how much of a gamble it is to maintain a healthy lifecycle for a GaaS title.
But here’s where Remedy Entertainment takes a different approach: Firebreak isn’t marketed as your typical live-service title. You won’t have to worry about missing any live events, battle passes, or a shiny new piece of overpowered gear being available for a limited time. Everything operates in a standard 3-player cooperative, first-person shooter gameplay with freely accessible mission-based jobs.
It’s a moderately paced format where you complete objectives and head back to the elevator to escape—any Left 4 Dead players should feel at home here.
But what about those incentive elements that I mentioned previously? Well, the game has those in the form of Requisition and Research; the former functions similarly to theWarbonds from Helldivers 2, where you can purchase new cosmetics, augments, devices, and weapons, while the latter allows you to invest resources in purchasing passive perks and bonuses.
It creates an entire gameplay loop that revolves around partaking in jobs, leveling up each of the three main classes, earning Lost Assets and other rare resources, and then investing them to outfit your character with a custom loadout, one that’ll preferably benefit your team for the required mission. And the cherry on top of this cycle is how the game’s jobs are freely customizable, from adjusting the Threat Level to setting up Anomalies to hunt down.
At least the silver lining in all of this is how FBC: Firebreak manages to retain the core identity of feeling like a Remedy Entertainment game.
I’ll be straightforward here; it might be because I’ve been spoiled by similar titles that lean more towards a power-fantasy trope, but this entire gameplay loop didn’t seem that intriguing to me. It’s got a somewhat satisfying gunplay feel, but even that isn’t enough to make you feel hooked in the grand scheme of things, and that’s fine because the game’s designed to be played in burst sessions.
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You’re not grinding for high-tier loot or anything; it’s a moderately paced format where you complete objectives and head back to the elevator to escape—any Left 4 Dead players should feel at home here. Unless some mission objectives or enemies get on your nerves, you can at least adjust each job to your preference before launching them to adjust their pacing or difficulty.
However, even adjusting that isn’t necessary, as the game features only the occasional powerful enemy spawning in a few instances. There aren’t any actual challenging boss fights in this game aside from that last encounter in the Paper Chase job. I would’ve loved it if the game gave me more encounters like the ones in jobs at higher clearance levels, but as of now, that’s something on my personal bucket list that they (hopefully) will incorporate in content updates soon.
Who You Gonna Call? Firebreak!
Not everything is a cakewalk, as you might expect, given how much I’ve talked about it having an arcade-feel with its loop. You’re still obligated to strategize with your team via the pinging system or on voice comms since the game won’t explicitly tell you everything. I emphasize that highly, especially when playing at higher threat levels or hunting down the Black Rock Launcher for the Anomalies.
So, to reiterate, it’s not totally an on-rails experience, and if you happen to want to run a match in quick succession, setting up the modifiers can do exactly that. Although there’s the option to opt in for solo play, the game is intended to be played with a squad of two other players, since leveling those characters individually and earning Lost Assets in heavy chunks are crazy hard—yeah, good luck doing that alone.
It doesn’t have that intricate storytelling structure or anything remotely close to Alan Wake, but with such a laid-back yet reckless comical sense added on top of its serviceable setting, the whole banter between Hank as he’s guiding you through jobs reminds me of a chaotic suicide mission you’d see in media like Inglourious Basterds or even any Tarantino action flick. It’s all weirdly hyperactive.
Given that the game will continue to receive updates to improve its lifecycle and maintain steady engagement with its player base, my current gripes about the vanilla state are the lack of weapon variety and the absence of any meaningful incentives that might cause me to lose interest after my 15th or 16th job with the boys.
It’s for sure dumb fun at its finest when I can swing my possessed piggy bank-attached wrench around to melt hordes of Hiss in conjunction with the newly spawned powerful enemy. Still, on the downside, I can’t see myself running the same job back a few times just to grind those rare resources and get a better version of the perk or weapon I already own.
Closing Comments:
Remedy Entertainment takes a safe approach to the multiplayer scene with their red-hot FBC: Firebreak. The game delivers exactly what it says on the tin—an easy pick-up-and-play cooperative FPS title with a simplistic footing, but without the traditional live-service elements plaguing its future. The gunplay, albeit a bit too arcadey for my liking, thankfully gets outshone by the teamplay-style presentation during jobs and their tunable modifiers, and the unique character classes and their traits. Although most of its rewarding features add variability to custom loadouts, there’s not much else here that, unfortunately, makes it worth spending an effort on. I’d much rather see a sizable number of differences in the job variety, missions, and power fantasy elements that actually heighten the sense of being an FBC operative who’s exterminating the evil corruption of the Hiss.
