FBC: Firebreak preview — Regaining control

Stay in your lane. That’s what game developers often hear when trying something new. It could be a small feature or a full-blown game mode, but we don’t appreciate the creativity offered by these wonderful people. Remedy has long thrown off that yoke, making whatever the heck they want and injecting the most insane design choices out there. The same can be said in their newest game, FBC: Firebreak, which breaks their usual third-person, narrative-driven mold for a first-person shooter with live-service elements. After viewing an hour-long presentation and speaking with the game director, I’m excited to see how Remedy’s approach can lead to something I’ll play for months on end.

While I didn't see an abundance of gameplay in the presentation, I left with a good sense of the direction Remedy is taking FBC: Firebreak. Game Director Mike Kayatta told us that while they weren’t abandoning Remedy’s signature storytelling, FBC: Firebreak won’t have a traditional narrative. Instead, the focus is put on the gameplay and weaving these tales in your head, using your FBC agent to construct your own story, even if there’s plenty loosely tying you into the greater Remedy-verse.

FBC: Firebreak is built on several main pillars: Only in Control, Pick Up and Play, Better Together, and Fun on Repeat. Only in Control references how the team wants you to feel like you’re only getting this experience in a Remedy Control game; being weird and unpredictable. Was the content of the game something that would only happen in Control? If it fit, it made the cut, if not, see you later.

Pick Up and Play is all about the player's experience. They don’t want you to look at FBC: Firebreak as a second job, chasing dailies or grinding a battle pass. This philosophy might be somewhat opposed to the normal live service nature shooters fall into, but Remedy wants you playing this because you want to play it, not because of FOMO. It also lends to their philosophy of making sure players can dive in without restrictions, mainly that your buddies can join in and have fun without needing to have played the game the same amount you have.

In Better Together, figuring out how to properly balance the three-player co-op is essential to the makeup of FBC: Firebreak. Remedy wants it to feel meaningful, but not force coordination between players. Being able to make the choice to prop your feet up and simply enjoy FBC: Firebreak, or tilt forward in your gaming chair, comming to your team is a design choice I can get behind.

Finally, Fun on Repeat is all about bringing you back the right way. The FBC: Firebreak team is small, on the fifty person side, so flooding the game with weekly updates, constant new missions, and more just isn’t humanly possible. Instead, building the game intentionally, creating a playground of engaging gameplay that meshes with the mechanics to birth unique moments in your session will make FBC: Firebreak a game you want to dive back into over and over again.

Jobs are the missions in FBC: Firebreak: a crisis needs solving on a specific level of the Oldest House. There’s a lot more to these crises – status effects, enemy types, and more – but the team is saving those reveals up to launch. Mixing all of these systems together and giving the players the agency to get creative will lead into no two sessions being alike; your stamping out of the Hiss will feel uniquely yours.

The difficulty choices also intrigue me. Once you pick your job, you’ll be faced with a threat and clearance level. Threat level is your more normal difficulty, with more Hiss dropping in or at higher frequencies, stronger variants, and more. Clearance level ties into your job, with new sections of these levels opening up depending on your choice. It’ll grant better rewards as well, assuming you don’t fall victim to Hiss during these additional steps of your mission. These modifiers in tandem will give you the challenge you want with the time you have to play.

Loadouts are going to be your lifeline in these missions. Not dissimilar to what you’ll find in something like Rainbow 6, you’ll pick weaponry, along with a crisis kit which mimics the operators from Siege. These kits are built around a specialized tool – yes, the garden gnome is one of them – and even if you brought the wrong one in, you’ll be able to swap between them mid-job (although your loadouts are limited to three). I’m excited to see plenty of wonky MacGuyvered tools here, which lends itself to the idea of having to work on the fly with this outbreak occurring and having to lock down the Oldest House; you aren’t getting any outside help unfortunately.

I didn’t get the best look at them, but there will also be a lot of perks to choose from that you’ll unlock through completing jobs via an in-game currency. This is a deep system Remedy is injecting to mix up your runs, modifiers that will be crucial to you completing the toughest jobs. For example, one perk might give a missed bullet a chance to return to your clip, or to extinguish a burn status by jumping up and down. Taking this system a step further, if you equip more of the same kinds of perks, you’ll get a boosted version and even a squad version if taken that far. Matching the right perks to the right job sounds essential in FBC: Firebreak, and I look forward to seeing what they cook up in this tree.

Watching this in motion gives more context to what Remedy is crafting. I can see shades of Call of Duty’s Zombie mode and Left 4 Dead in here, but much more curated comparatively. The job system makes your session focused, which is something I prefer when playing any game like this. In a small snippet of gameplay, the team was taking on… sticky notes. Apparently this infected item was taking over this section of the Oldest House, and there were a bunch to dispose of.

Even though I didn’t have my hands on a controller, the gunplay seems pretty solid for a somewhat first outing for Remedy (the team was a part of the CrossfireX campaign, although not a great example of what they’re capable of). All of the different Hiss are here, the environments are on point for what you’d expect in Control, and the gameplay oozes Remedy charm. The sticky notes even took the form of enemies at one point, eventually culminating in a humongous sticky note monster at the end. Escaping at the end isn’t necessary to completing your mission – something I appreciate after watching my hard work go up in flames in extraction shooters – but being able to gain some extra reward for making it out alive is a nice touch that makes it worthwhile to do so.

Post-launch may seem like a dirty word in the live-service genre, just as live-service itself is a loaded one. Remedy has concrete plans for FBC: Firebreak, and will share more of those later on. There will be a mix of free and paid updates, but everything you spend money on will be purely cosmetic. New jobs and more will be free.

My main curiosities lie in how the game will feel in action, and that will have to wait for another day, but thankfully it will be soon. FBC: Firebreak will launch this Summer, and will be available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles. Even better, it will also launch day one on Xbox Game Pass and Ultimate, and PlayStation Plus’s Extra and Premium tiers. Remedy is also doing all they can to make the game Steam Deck-certified as well. Keep your eyes on GamingTrend for our continued coverage and eventual review for FBC: Firebreak!