FBC: Firebreak - The Oldest Housework (Review)

FBC: Firebreak

Released: June 17th, 2025

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Publisher: Remedy Entertainment

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S

A friend of mine is a massive fan of Remedy’s narrative universe, and she in turn has two friends equally rabid for the shared world of Alan Wake and Control. My friend was pretty bummed out while visiting recently - before she even had a chance to play FBC: Firebreak, the two fellow fans she’d planned to play with had already refunded it. 

As much as the situation sucks for her, I can’t blame her mates in the slightest.

Pictured: a very typical scene.

It’s hard to imagine Firebreak wasn’t made by an outside studio cynically contracted by corporate to produce some cheap guff. It’s stunning Remedy had anything to do with such a barren product, one that evidences exactly zero enthusiasm for itself. I may not have been fond of Alan Wake 2, but at least it had some spark to it.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept - a cooperative shooter spinoff featuring employees of the FBC is a cute idea with lots of fun potential. It’s an idea wasted, however, on trudging gameplay with anemic combat, barren content, and utterly uninspiring progress incentives. What could have been a great exploration of Control's wider universe is instead a creatively infertile island.

Under the constant visual effects, you sometimes see a game.

An underwhelming lifelessness permeates the entire thing. Its humble offering of chores dressed as missions gets old rapidly. There’s so little atmosphere, so few dynamic elements, that it feels very much like Remedy itself got bored of developing the bloody thing halfway through. Given how little there is for a player to work towards, it certainly feels only half done.

Aside from some highly questionable design decisions, Firebreak is at least competently made. That’s as high a compliment as I could give it. It works. It’s stable enough. It does its job, and boy does it feel like a job, for game and player both. I could offer praise in one other area - finding and getting into a match is astoundingly quick with almost no connection or loading times. It’s just a shame such instant access is for something so undesirable. 

One mission has you face off against evil meringue.

Firebreak takes place in the Oldest House, with players acting as troubleshooters for the Federal Bureau of Control. Teams of three tackle a smattering of paranormal problems, completing various humdrum tasks while fending off attacks from the Hiss, those glorified zombies introduced in Control. I really do wish they'd move onto a more exciting antagonist, something that better reflects a world of liminal space and eerie phenomena.

Missions are straightforward - arrive via elevator, do some rote busywork, then run back to the elevator while a final wave of glowing red zomboids give chase. Rinse (literally in this game’s case) and repeat. Repeat and repeat and repeat, and don’t expect anything unique or exciting to happen, because it almost certainly won’t. 

Get used to a lot of this.

Jobs include a lot of fetch questing or destroying things that cling onto the environment. You'll often run maintenance on things by clicking shoulder buttons in random sequences, a surprisingly fun minigame that gets so overused the novelty soon wears off. Showers are used as healing stations, with water being vital not just for HP, but for removing negative status effects and various clingy nastiness. Teams will also want to activate safe rooms for respawn points and look for documents that are turned in post-match for currency.

Requisition Points serve as the main currency, exchanged for perks and such tantalizing items as sprays. Fucking sprays. Those pointless cosmetics stuffed into battle passes and other monetized grifts when developers can't think of content actually worth selling. Firebreak has a whole ton of sprays to unlock in a game where stopping to daub a picture of a duck on the wall is even more pointless than usual.   

Could be literally any shooter, really.

Players pick “classes” via a specialist Kit added to their loadout. Despite the game telling you each Kit comes with three items, this isn’t actually true - they each come with one, and you need to grind for the other two. Such a drip feed is a bad idea because the starter tools are literally just tools, making one’s introduction to the game as mundane as possible. If they felt it had to be done this way to increase engagement, I can suggest a better tactic - make the game fucking engaging.  

Onboarding sucks in general, anyway. Insufficient tutorials, poor explanations for mechanics, brief and uneventful early missions, just a horrid first impression. I swear I keep seeing players do manual tasks that their Kits can perform automatically, seemingly unaware of what the hell to do.  

I won't say the water looks like cum, but...

The Fix Kit has a wrench which bashes broken things into operation, the Jump Kit charges dead electronics via a zappy thing, and the Splash Kit is a big water gun for putting out fires. These tools have secondary combat utilities, with the wrench knocking enemies back, the zapper stunning them, and the water gun dishing debuffs while boosting the Jump Kit’s electricity. They can also be upgraded late down the line, becoming more efficient with some investment.

Req Points you can buy cooldown attacks known as Augments and a one-use device unique to each Kit. Devices take ages to set up, having to be awkwardly built or charged, and they’re incredibly fragile. The Fix Kit’s Swivel Cannon is basically a prank - it’s a horribly slow turret that deals vicious damage to any players caught in the unpredictable AoE blast. Utterly awful.

The Swivel Cannon claims another victim.

I’m not fond of friendly fire at the best of times, but Firebreak is one of the biggest pisstakers I’ve seen in years. It’s especially detrimental here, where splash damage is brutal and hard to gauge. Grenades can hurt you from far beyond what seems a reasonable distance, and so much player offense in general is a liability. Even reviving a downed ally can hurt you if they fell to status effects.

There’s a perk you can equip that makes your tool more lethal if you’re out of ammo. This applies to the water gun as well, with the side effect of adding friendly fire to it so you can’t douse your allies without hurting them and you can't use it at all without the risk of taking area damage. Firebreak is full of fucking nonsense like this, and it honestly feels like a joke at the player's expense.

Hiss Breakers are big lumbering bastards who like to ruin lives.

Friendly fire and a lack of compelling abilities are just part of a fundamentally rubbish combat system. It’s a bare bones FPS at heart, with bland stock guns that look, sound, and feel weak. Most of the firearms feel ill suited to fast swarms of Hiss, and it takes a lot of Req points to improve the halfway decent ones.

You get to equip just one weapon and one of three mundane grenade types. It's all you get unless you find a spooky shrapnel blaster in a safe room that can't be refilled once it runs dry. Ammo depletes ridiculously quickly for every gun, forcing retreats back to ammo dispensers. Melee attacks are absolute garbage, so you don’t really have a fallback even with perks that boost close range damage. 

It does look a bit cummy though.

Missions themselves are rote and tiresome. I can only wander around a big room destroying piles of evil post-it notes for so long until I’m bored out of my skull. Each job involves a lot of busywork, just running around the same maps doing the same couple of things while the same waves of enemies come and interfere. Every missions feels like a slog before too long, the kind of game one stops playing because they just can't take another laborious round.

Firebreak gets more interesting when played on the harder difficulty settings - randomization is increased and spooky objects start messing with you. Having a magic traffic light shove itself in your face and turn red makes for some pretty tense moments as you have to remain still or get smoked.

On Hard or Extreme, the final run back to an elevator actually approaches excitement at times, with vast amounts of Hiss giving chase. Sadly, the tougher difficulties also drag missions out longer and makes the more annoying parts even less enjoyable.

The traffic light is smart, it knows you should stop playing.

Enemy variety is miserable. Enemies of a type look exactly the same as each other, and there are very few types to begin with. Occasionally you get powerful minibosses and they’re literally no different than whatever basic mook they’re based on, looking and behaving identically with only buffed stats and a bigger health bar to speak of. It’s just bloody sad. 

My criticisms of the Hiss can be applied to Control as well, since Firebreak takes a lot from it. Enemies were disappointing in that game too, but constant exposure to them during missions makes their blandness way too obvious. Also, I'm pretty sure Control had a LOT more diversity in its Hiss.

BONK!

Player progression and rewards are pathetic. The handful of cosmetics, almost entirely recolors of the same three basic outfits, are so disappointing, and why the fuck does this game have sprays as if anybody gives a shit? Sorry, but I still cannot get over the sprays. Firebreak has to have one of the least diverse, most paltry selection of unlocks I’ve seen in years. 

Graphics are fine. Sound is dismal. The voice clips for player characters are completely obnoxious.

Endless screen-splashing effects.

I won’t accuse FBC: Firebreak’s developers of not caring, but I fear that may be less of an insult than suggesting they actually tried. Everything about it screams obligation, like nobody involved had their hearts in it, and I almost hope that’s the case because I'd feel truly gutted for anybody who thought they'd made something terrific. What a shame.

5/10