Firefighting Simulator Ignite review — wet stuff on the red stuff

There are dirty jobs, there are boring jobs, there are easy jobs, and there are hard jobs.  There are also terrifying jobs, and firefighting is among them.  When everyone else is running away from danger, they’re running towards it.  Wearing specialized gear, they burst through doors where the other side is likely engulfed in fire, risking their own lives to save yours.  It’s without a second’s hesitation that I say they are heroes in every way, and it’s easy to forget how important they are until you need them.  They’re meeting you on the worst day of your life, and possibly your last.  How in the world do you convey the dangers of fighting a fire, rescuing lives, and operating specialized equipment to get everyone home safe?  Simulation veterans weltenbauer are following on the heels of their construction simulation title, now with a new engine, fresh challenges and threats, and more complexity than ever.  The siren is ringing out, let’s save some lives.

Right out of the gate you’ll find your first improvement over weltenbauer’s previous game from three years ago.  Rather than tutorials existing in a different training area like you’d find in other firefighting games, you’re thrown right into the action with your first call-out.  There are some guide rails to teach you how things work, so don’t worry – you’ll be alright. On the other hand, victims are laying on the floor inside that burning building, so you better learn fast or people die.  No pressure!

The next improvement isn’t subtle either – the game now uses Unreal Engine 5.  More than just a graphical uplift, the game now supports crumbling materials, floor and ceiling collapses, debris that falls and moves, volumetric smoke that can envelope a room, and fire that seemingly moves with a mind of its own.  The emphasis is on all of those things, so the characters aren’t photorealistic, and some animations are still pretty odd (the typical Unreal Engine 5 hunch), with your firefighters doing an odd sort of duck walk as they run, but it’s an obvious and welcome improvement.  As you’d expect, the higher priority is fire.

Fire has a natural movement to it that can seem like it is thinking and reacting.  Worse still, it can be unpredictable and volatile at a moment’s notice.  It’s here that weltenbauer does the most homework.  To best illustrate that, let’s talk through a random callout.  

In addition to the central storyline missions, there are also randomized call-outs.  You can flip a handful of switches to adjust difficulty and how much autonomy the AI would have, but the placement of things, what dangers you might face, how many victims, and even where the fire has occurred in the city is randomized.  Once you select the mission you’ll get the callout and sirens in the station.  You’re already in your turnout gear, so the only thing left to do is get on the truck.  Once you do, you now have to race against the clock to take the most efficient and safe route through the city to the fire, and you’ll be graded on your performance.  Once you arrive and park, the real work begins.

The truck has everything you need to fight any scenario you’ll encounter in the game.  In this event we find ourselves at an office building.  A fire has started on the second floor, cutting access to the third floor, and there are people trapped on the roof.  We’ve grabbed a truck with a rescue basket that can handle three ambulatory victims, so we can hop onto the controls and move that ladder into position.  This particular model (one of the seven real engines you can unlock in the game) has a large-bore nozzle mounted to the end of the ladder, meaning you can get foam or water onto a fire, even if it’s fully engulfing a window you’d need to make entry.  Dousing around the outside, and then dumping foam inside to make a path, we rush into the second floor, my wife with a fire axe, and me with a Halligan bar. The AI player has grabbed a feed line and ran it to the nearest hydrant and to the truck to ensure we don’t run out of water, and the other AI firefighter has grabbed a red attack line, attached a nozzle, and brought it forward to fight the fire.  Rounding a corner into the break room, we find it is completely engulfed in flames, but I hear something more concerning – the crackling of electricity.  As you can imagine, spraying water or foam into an open and burning electrical panel is about as ill-advised as you can get.  I task our AI buddy to stop fighting the fire and to go search for the electrical panel.  

The panel ended up being on the first floor.  Turning it off ensured the fire wouldn’t restart due to electrical sparks.  With the box disabled we were able to beat back the fire, contain the spread in the hallway and then use the Halligan bar or fire axe to break down doors or hack open walls to reach victims.  Those who can walk are escorted out, those who can’t are carried out to waiting medics in the parking lot.  Soon we get a call that the fire on the third floor and roof are spreading faster than we can contain.  Grabbing a circular saw off the truck, we cut a square into the roof to provide a ventilation point for the fire.  It pulls the fire in that direction as it’ll follow its food – oxygen. It also vents the smoke, raising the visibility inside the building dramatically. With precious time bought, we were able to finish rescuing all victims on that floor, allowing us to focus entirely on life saving on the last floor, then ultimately trying to save the structure itself.

Firefighting Simulator Ignite is nothing if not intense, especially so when you play it in first person perspective instead of third.  Looking around and seeing nothing but fire in all directions and knowing that your path out just collapsed is hair raising.  Knowing that you now have to rely on somebody to either cut open a wall or bring a ladder to come save you lest you become a victim yourself.  There is one small hitch though – your teammates aren’t always the sharpest marbles in the bag.

Holding down a shoulder button allows you to access a wheel to order your crew to tackle specific or general tasks.  Holding down the left trigger gives you a sort of x-ray vision to see certain things like windows, electrical panels, and victims.  You can’t see through the whole building, but you can see when things or people are close.  From here you use the radial menu to say things like “Search and rescue” to find victims, tell them to firefight in a specific spot, follow you, and about a dozen other commands. If you don’t give them commands you can instead set them to their own devices to act using the AI.  More than once I found one of my teammates just staring at the ceiling, doing nothing while the building burned.  I’d send them to go find an electrical panel, and they’d do that, but then not disable it, leaving it to short out and continue to cause havoc.  I also found myself up to my ears in fire as I had to chase behind them directly into a fully-engulfed room they decided to run into without a single reason to do so.  Maybe try putting out the fire in the hallway before you run down it, folks?  Ignite is a hell of a lot of fun when you’re playing with real humans, but the AI is certainly hit or miss at launch.  

During multiplayer I did run into a number of crashes that didn’t seem to have a rhyme or reason as to timing.  For hours the game would run stable, and then it’d crash 5-6 times in a five minute span.  We also ran into an issue that had us laughing hysterically as, instead of getting into the driver’s seat, my wife would suction to the side door like a remora, clinging to the outside.  Sadly, she had to quit and rejoin to fix the issue, but it happened at least once an hour, which was a little less funny. Throw in goofy driving behaviors from the second team as they drive through cars, cut you off, and generally cause headaches and it makes for some bumps in the road on the way to the fire.

Back at the station, you’ll find the game unfolds as you work to defend the fictional city of Oakridge from the threat of runaway fire situations.  These can be office fires, home blazes, backyard BBQs gone amok, picnic parties, apartment complexes, shopping malls, farms, and each present unique challenges, though I wish it was more of an impediment.  As you unlock larger vehicles, you’ll get access to trucks with aerials (ladders that can reach the top floor) but other than the mall setting, you don’t need a special truck to accomplish your task.  Sure, one with a basket can get more victims down at once, but you don’t need the T-Rex and its extra height but for that one setting.  Similarly, there’s always a nearby hydrant so having to manage truck tank capacity never enters into the equation.  These are things that can be added later, sure, but at present the trucks and attached equipment are distinctions without impact.  

A grease fire or oil spill can coat a floor instantly, making the floor or ceiling unstable.  It’ll also be so much worse if you spray it with water.  Electrical, as I said earlier, can continue to re-ignite (though I haven’t had it shock me yet), and smoke can kill you faster than fire.  Each mission requires you not only study the fire you see, but plan for the one you don’t.  There’s a good chance a kitchen could have a pan on fire full of cooking oil, so you might think ahead and bring a fire extinguisher.  Fighting normal fire is best done with water, but fighting a liquid other than grease is best done with foam. That extinguisher, however, is a finite resource as the can will run out, unlike the foam or water when hooked to a hydrant, but it’ll suppress that grease fire quickly.  Similarly, you might think opening up a bunch of doors with a Halligan bar might be a good idea until you get hit square in the face with a pent up backdraft you didn’t see as you weren’t using your thermal meter.  The same goes with cutting through a wall with an axe as you just created a new path for fire to travel, potentially consuming a room or pathway.  Approaching a fire like a puzzle to be handled in a certain order takes a bit of know-how and some experience.  

When you finish the mission you'll be given a rating based on time, if you completed the mission without casualties, if you knocked out all of the objectives, etc. How much water you used is also tracked, but I'm not sure it actually matters.  All of this culminates in a rating all the way up to Gold, giving you XP to unlock new ranks as well as vehicles and equipment.  It’s not a full-on RPG-like “allocate points to things” system (though that could be pretty cool), but it does give you some challenge mode targets, as do the random missions that keep you on your toes, as some elements can change and move. I do wish the simulation had a bit more gamification to it as it’d raise the stakes or the stress.  Using a Halligan bar means timing out a button press to strike at the right time, and then hammering the button till the door pops.  Using an axe is about aiming for the crack and hitting a button.  The saw has you keeping an arrow in the green, though coming off of it merely makes you stop and start from where you left off without much of a penalty. Turning off valves for gas is just a button press, as is turning off electrical, whereas putting on a feed line to a hydrant at least asks you to spin the stick to open the cap and thread on the pipe.  Having mechanisms to gamify these moments a bit more would slow the player down, making them take a breath and tackle the task carefully instead of quickly – what you’d expect from a firefighter.  This is where things like equipment failure would be useful.  A busted saw blade or a snapped axe handle costs precious time that could cause the fire to rage out of control.  There’s nothing preventing the team from adding these elements later, much like they did with their own Construction Simulator, so I have a feeling these might come post-launch.  All that said, there’s nothing stopping me from using an axe to smash a glass door the same way I did the outer window on the building, at least in real life.  Make me use the Halligan on heavy doors, but an axe should work remarkably well on anything less.  Similarly, a 10 pound Halligan bar should go through glass as well, as should a copper water nozzle – don’t make me go get an axe for that job.  

Much like Construction Simulator, a great deal of effort has been put into the overall authenticity of the procedures and equipment used.  That means real-life trucks like the TP3 Pumper, Viper 68’ Roadrunner, Rosenbauer T-Rex, and more, as well as HAIX Fire-Dex boots, Stihl saws, and a huge array of real-world equipment like helmets both classic and modern.  The newest and sometimes ultra-experimental gear like the absolutely phenomenal Senar augmented reality simulation and visualization gear, drone technology, LUNAR (a new system that lets you see through smoke), body cameras, and health tracker / GPS units are all at the cutting edge of fire fighting, and it could be cool to see some of these things in future expansions, but there’s no doubt that the team has spent a great deal of time learning about the tried-and-true methods and equipment that saves lives every day.  

There is one tool that I found myself using more and more often as the complexity of the fires increased – my heat meter.  This meter lets me see the unseen – fire tucked above ceiling tiles, potentially creating a fatal fall through the floor should I step on it.  When you think you’ve got a fire under control and the mission doesn’t immediately end, you’ve likely got something hidden, waiting to reignite.  Using this tool I’m able to see intense heat sources inside of walls and crawlspaces, especially prevalent in office buildings and malls.  Out come the saws and axes and we’re ready to re-attack the fire to make sure that it stays out and keeps everyone safe.  I hope more of these tools make their way into the game.  It’s a tool that you might not think of until one of these moments bites you hard, so having more of these specialty items would be a great addition to the overall loop. 

If those new technologies don’t come to fruition via an expansion, on PC you’ll have access to a whole mod system to simply do it yourself.  Creating missions and sharing them via Mod.io is possible on PC, and downloading / playing them is possible on consoles, but it’s not too far a stretch to imagine being able to mod in new behaviors and technologies.  The fire station is absolutely massive, so there’s plenty of room for that sort of thing.  

Ultimately, Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a great iteration from their efforts with Construction Simulator three years ago.  They learned a lot in that outing, and it shows.  Not just a jump to a new engine, this newest game brings physics, new behaviors, and plenty of new interactions that culminate in a better simulation, and arguably a better gameplay loop, overall.  Are there bugs?  Unfortunately that’s the case at launch, but thankfully nothing insurmountable.  Like their other titles, this will likely iron out over time and quickly.