FBC Firebreak review – a really weird game
On my best runs, with the best accidental match-ups, I’ve been the watering can guy. I’ll deploy alongside two far more talented players, and they’ll fix machinery and fight the hordes while I handle the watering. I’ll put out ground-based fires to allow for freedom of movement and to stop enemies being enraged by flames. I’ll put out any fires on my allies when they accidentally set light to themselves, so they don’t have to race back to the nearest shower block.
FBC: Firebreak reviewPublisher: Remedy EntertainmentDeveloper: Remedy EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X (and it’s on Game Pass).
This works, until it doesn’t work. I’ll be watering away and then I’ll round a corner and an elite baddie will pop up. Oh, Christ, I’ll think. It’s RACHEL DAVIES. (Elite baddies in Firebreak always come with names plucked out of some Platonic HR database.) Rachel Davies will be on fire and she’ll be floating and laying down hellish covering damage. Monsters will spawn beneath her and we’ll be over-run and no more machinery will get fixed. And there’s nothing that the watering can man can do now except die as efficiently as possible.
A step back: Control was a fairly normal game that wanted you to think it was weird. Underneath the stylish disarray, it offered a pleasantly traditional blend of shooting and physic-based magic powers, and it let you loose against a range of entertainingly predictable enemies in close confines. FBC: Firebreak is a Control spin-off, but get this. It’s a weird game that wants you to think it’s normal. On the surface it’s a run-based co-op shooter that should fit in somewhere between Helldivers 2 and something like REPO. But underneath…?
Once again we’re in the Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, an agency that deals with anything that’s traditionally accompanied by a theremin when it turns up in a TV show. The Oldest House was absolutely the best thing about Control, a game fairly filled with good things, so it’s lovely to be back. Polished concrete! Wood- and glass-lined conference rooms! Weird Lovecraftian mines with slate roofs and horrible things growing in the dark. You get the idea.
In Firebreak, you take the role of a bunch of endlessly expendable janitors, and the missions often take you into parts of the Oldest House that were one-shot gags in Control. That room filled with Post-it notes? It’s now a mission, in which you have to clean up an infestation of Post-its and maybe fight a giant Post-it monster. That furnace, whose staging was so luminously clever you almost felt your eyebrows turning to cinder in its presence? That’s another mission where you have to fix up machinery and step inside the turbines to get them venting again.
