FBC: Firebreak review: "A disappointingly bland multiplayer FPS that's missing far too much of what made Control special"

Playing as the lowly grunts that you usually never think about in a shooter is a spin-off concept full of potential – FBC: Firebreak at least has some solid ideas. Bungie managed to get an outstanding game out of what it was like to be a non-spartan in the Halo universe with Halo 3 ODST. But a multiplayer spin-off where you play a bunch of nobodies can end up being a flavorless slog, like Metroid Prime Federation Force, a lousy 3DS game you probably forgot existed until this sentence. Sadly, I think FBC: Firebreak might be in for a similar fate.

FBC: Firebreak is a spin-off of Control, Remedy's psychic powered Metroidvania. There, you explore an extra-shadowy government agency tasked with investigating paranormal phenomena, like a fridge that slaughters you if you stop staring at it for a split second. Intriguing, but the game's main hook is the fun supernatural abilities you get to play with, like telekinesis and mind control. FBC: Firebreak's riskiest move is to take all those fun powers away. You're a lowly working stiff at the bureau now, buddy. Be grateful you even get a firearm.

Making a Splash

In teams of three, ideally, you embark on 'jobs' that play like a more regular shooter than Control. Each member of the team gets a choice of gun, grenade, and can either pack a jump kit, fix kit, or splash kit. Fix kit has a wrench that can fix stuff with a couple of quick bashes. Jump kit can charge up electronics with several jolts from their electro-gun. And splash kit can make things wet. Surprisingly, that might be the most useful of the three.

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Jobs alternate between charmingly bizarre, like cleaning out an office full of hostile sticky notes, and disappointingly routine, like fixing a bunch of massive fans. A lot of these are simply window dressing on things you've done countless times in other team shooters. Get resource into X device, fix Y broken machines to open Z, etc. All livened up by the waves of horrible monsters that keep spawning to stop you, naturally.

For a while, that window dressing is just about interesting enough. Activating igniters to slowly take out frost anomalies is pretty tedious, but throwing skier mannequins on a mystical ski lift to proceed is pleasingly odd. Other quirks include restoring health by taking a shower, and there's even achievements for dying in the shower ('Hitchcock Moment') and for the whole team taking a shower together. Awww!

Shields only regenerate when you're near teammates which discourages being a lone wolf jerk and rewards working as a team. Apex Legends' excellent 'ping' system, which lets you highlight points of interest to the team, is here instead of voice chat. That's an odd choice, especially since this Metroidvania spin-off doesn't have a map, as Remedy wants finding the healing showers and ammo stations to be part of the challenge.

Fine, but they've prioritized confusing office verisimilitude over intuitive level design, so I was constantly smacking into dead ends and wandering into the toilets by mistake when all I wanted to do was get back to my team. It's hard to get across 'no no no not that way you oaf' with the ping system. If it's meant to be deliberately frustrating, congratulations, I guess?

At first I thought fire was completely broken, which at least was appropriate to the game's title. Get set alight and I either had to hope someone's playing as the person who can shoot water over you, or desperately find a shower. Often fire took me out so quickly that it felt like I was better off just giving up and hoping someone resurrected me when I was downed. But it's also possible to catch fire yourself from helping a downed teammate. So much for teamwork. Is the moral of FBC: Firebreak that we should let our friends burn to death?

But the more I played, the more I discovered other ways of dealing with my burning issue. Lobbing grenades around the office sets off the sprinklers, giving me another crucial source of water. Jumping on a zipline also moves me fast enough to remove fire. Still, helpful as these discoveries were, all they really did was make fire slightly less irritating.

I was thrilled when I finally unlocked a perk that let me remove status ailments by jumping, particularly because it's fun to imagine other online players wondering why I suddenly won't stop jumping up and down. But making perks like this something to aspire to feels like an admission that these ailment systems aren't much fun or interesting to engage with in the first place.

Odd Jobs

The guns are nothing to write home about either. You could be really generous and see that as encouragement to use more novel offensive tactics, like soaking enemies in water and then electrocuting them. It encourages jump kit and splash kit players to work together, but we've been pulling off tricks like this since Bioshock. It's not nearly as satisfying as telepathically ripping chunks out of walls and burying them in enemy's faces like you did in Control proper.

The main problem is that too many of these jobs feel like, well, work. Take the one where you have to clear out the hostile sticky notes. You do this by shooting them, which has to be the most inefficient way to clean an office short of using dynamite. Except when you do shoot the sticky notes they spray everywhere, and if enough of them stick to you, you have to hop in the shower and sloooowly wait for them to be washed off before they kill you. To counter this, you can make the sticky notes wet first, either by playing as the character who can spray water, or setting off the sprinklers. I unlocked a perk which made my machine gun bullets wet which helped massively here.

But even with that perk it's still such a chore. A machine gun is just the completely wrong tool to make this a satisfying job, and God help you if you opted for the revolver. This is crying out for a gadget swiped from PowerWash Simulator. Waves of enemies showing up to attack the team should fill us with dread, not relief that we get to shoot something more interesting for a while. Monster men made out of sticky notes are more fun to fight in later sections, but why does it have to be such a slog to get to them?

Overworked

Even the slightly better jobs, like shooting gross leeches that eject neon gunk in the hopes of them also dropping nuclear pearls, are made dull by the way the game escalates. Complete a job and you'll unlock the next level of it. Each level adds fresh challenges, which is good, but also demands you clear vastly inflated goals, which is appalling. You seriously want us to shoot 50000 sticky notes to see the next bit? That would get repetitive in a game that had made that task fun, let alone this one.

Control was no masterpiece, but whenever I was about to give up on it, it would sucker me in with a fun set-piece or new superpower. That floating orb which heals enemies was an absolute nightmare until you could mind control it into healing you instead. And flying suicidal explosive enemies became a highlight once your telekinesis was strong enough to pluck them out of the sky and use them as organic grenades. But in FBC: Firebreak you can usually only shoot them, which feels like a major step backwards. This bestiary isn't nearly as satisfying to fight with these guns. Maybe a hero shooter would have been a better fit for a spin-off of a game all about playing with amazing powers?

There's a horrible screaming monster, which is invisible until it's about to attack you, only weak to attacks from the front, and sprays a near-lethal attack at you from said front. It came close to ruining Control and I think it's succeeded in ruining this. It is just no fun at all to fight without Control's dodge move, and has been responsible for losses on so many teams I've played with. Suddenly the pinging system's presence here makes sense, because if voice chat was on the swearing alone would become a jump scare.

What's frustrating is that occasionally it does work. At one point my team was pursued by a sentient traffic light which would occasionally pick on one of us and turn red, meaning a deadly punishment if that player dared move. Your teammates being forced to cover you while you stand stock still and stare at that horrible traffic light longing it to turn green is wonderfully tense, and shows a Control multiplayer shooter is an idea with great potential.

One unlockable skill lets you temporarily tape a piggy bank to the end of your melee weapon. Bash an enemy with it, and it creates a tornado of broken porcelain and loose change. Yes, more of this please! But that's a rare treat, and soon you're back to a disappointingly bland FPS. A repetitive team shooter releasing in a competitive field with too little in it to recommend. Maybe the bureau's next assignment should be investigating what on Earth happened here.

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