There’s something really exciting about FBC: Firebreak, Remedy’s take on cooperative, online first-person shooters. I’ve been trying to pinpoint a specific wow factor since attending the game’s developer-led demonstration last week, but I’ve concluded it’s a combination of multiple cool features blended perfectly together. FBC: Firebreak is set in the sterile headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control and it features Remedy’s trademark dark surrealism, but it’s also infused with a healthy dose of silliness and mechanical depth. The result feels like a modern Left 4 Dead in the best possible way, just with Hiss instead of zombies and three players instead of four.
Left 3 Dead, anyone?
FBC: Firebreak takes place six years after the end of Control. The Oldest House, which used to be the seat of power for the FBC, has been sealed with the Hiss inside, and it’s now time to eradicate the invasion and lift the lockdown. The agency is sending in the Firebreak team, a unit composed of government volunteers with no extra combat training and little hope of making it out alive. As a member of Firebreak, you’re handed some special equipment, patted on the back and locked inside the headquarters with the Hiss and every unfortunate employee it’s infested. Good luck.
The game is broken down by Jobs, which are essentially custom-built missions in specific regions of The Oldest House. All Jobs have three zones, but otherwise each one has a unique objective, crisis, and environment. After selecting a Job, you get to customize your run by setting the Threat Level and Clearance Level — Threat Level determines combat difficulty and the number of rewards up for grabs, while Clearance Level sets the number of zones you have to clear and the type of rewards.
“I will say we do have more than three clearance levels, and you get into some pretty interesting stuff later, such as corrupted items that appear during the job,” game director Mike Kayatta said.
Remedy Entertainment
Before the match begins, each player gets to select one of three Crisis Kits, loadouts designed with specific playstyles in mind. Crisis Kits come with a tool and an item each. The Jump Kit is based around electricity and it has the Electro-Kinectic Charge Impactor, a portable jackhammer kind of device with a conductive metal plate on the end, capable of slamming into enemies or propelling yourself into the air. It also has the BOOMbox, which plays music to attract enemies before exploding. The Fix Kit gives you a big wrench that’s able to repair machinery and stagger Hiss, and it also includes a turret that you have to smack with the wrench to assemble. The Splash Kit is for all the water signs out there — it features the Crank-Operated Fluidic Injector, an industrial water cannon that can extinguish fires and soak enemies so they’re primed for extra damage, plus a Humidifier, which sprays healing water in a wide area.
“A good way to look at all of this is that you’re going to kind of combine the threat level and the clearance level and the type of job you want to play to sort of create your own load, your own experience, exactly the session that you’re looking for with whatever group you’re playing with that night,” Kayatta said.
Members of the Firebreak squad have their own Research Perks, or upgrade slots. You purchase Perks with currency earned during Jobs, and stacking upgrades of the same type strengthens their effect. Equipping three Perks of the same type lends that ability to nearby teammates as well.
Remedy Entertainment
“For example, one perk might give you the feature that each missed bullet has a chance to return to your clip, or the ability to extinguish yourself by jumping up and down, which is how that of course works,” community manager Julius Fondem said. “If you equip just one perk, you get its effect. Simple, straightforward. If you equip two of the same type, you get a stronger version of that perk. And if you equip three of the same perk type, you can actually share its effect with your nearby crewmates. As you increase your kit proficiency, you’ll increase the slots you have to play with, giving you the opportunity to play with a lot of different builds and strategies.”
Killing Hiss is all fine and dandy, but collecting currency is a major goal of each run in FBC: Firebreak, too. Currency is used to purchase new gear and cosmetics as well as Perks. Regardless of whether you actually escape a Job alive, you’re rewarded with XP and proficiencies for the gear you used. You can only earn currency by finding it in the environment and successfully escaping with it (and your life).
“Ultimately, Firebreak is about efficiency,” Fondem said. “You can’t fail objectives, but the longer you spend doing them, the more and more Hiss will show up to stop you, increasing the chance that your crew dies on the job. That means the longer you spend exploring for currency, the more risk you’re inviting and the harder it will eventually become to make it back to headquarters in one piece.”
Speaking of currency — Remedy promises it won’t charge for critical content post-launch.
“We want to keep all of our players united, which means that all playable post-launch content, such as Jobs, will be free for everyone who has the game,” Fondem said. “We’ll support the game by offering paid cosmetic content as well.”
The Job that Remedy showed off in the media briefing (and featured in today’s Future Games Show Spring Showcase) was Paper Chase, a mission filled with flying yellow sticky notes, sticky-note monsters, and one hulking sticky-note titan as the final boss. It’s set in a classic FBC office space, concrete walls and blood-orange carpet, and players have to eradicate the rogue, multiplying sticky notes as well as the rushing Hiss. Little squares of paper swirl through the air and cling to the player’s face, covering the screen at times, amid explosions, flickering lights and showers of bullets. At one point, a player places a piggy bank in their melee weapon and smashes it on the Hiss, screaming, “Stand back, piggy’s coming out!” It activates an AOE wind effect on nearby enemies. There are environmental factors to mess with and a range of weapons to deploy — shotguns, machine guns, rifles, pistols, water cannons, turrets, grenades, electrified impact devices, boomboxes — and overall, Paper Chase seems like a damn good time.
Remedy Entertainment
It’s taken plenty of iteration to get to this point. And as it turns out, FBC: Firebreak isn’t limited to three players just to differentiate itself from a slightly similar 16-year-old game with a four in its title.
“The reason why we did three-player squads, really, it was like an organic quirk of the development,” Kayatta said. “We actually started testing with four players. I think it just didn’t feel quite as good. It was a little harder to understand where people were. That’s something that’s, like, not required but definitely helpful in this game. And it just felt like, with all of the chaos and all of the fun systems going off, three just felt right over time. So that’s it. And yeah, you can play solo or duo.”
FBC: Firebreak is due out this summer, and it’s heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, plus it’ll be available day-one on Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. It’ll support cross-play. Remedy is aiming for a “lower-minimum” PC spec requirement and optimizing the game for Steam Deck. Still, FBC: Firebreak will ship with full ray-tracing support, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex capabilities.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/fbc-firebreak-first-look-left-4-dead-but-with-remedys-silly-surreal-touch-214657219.html?src=rss
