The bar for multiplayer shooters is incredibly high. In many cases, the game’s developer wants you to play it daily, ideally for weeks on end. The potentially massive money at stake means the genre is extremely saturated, and only the absolute best will find any kind of success. However, the more I learn about FBC: Firebreak, Remedy Entertainment’s multiplayer spin-off of Control, the more I see how its developer plans to reject the mainstream to carve its own space in the genre. The studio flew me out to its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, to get some hands-on with the game and speak to the folks behind its creation.
First introduced in Control, the fittingly named Federal Bureau of Control is a surreal, mindbending space where the mundane becomes the supernatural. When Jesse Faden becomes the bureau’s director in the opening moments of Control, she’s sent on a harrowing, life-defining journey to purge the Hiss from its walls.
In stark contrast, FBC: Firebreak has you and your friends play as one to three of the bureau’s everyday employees, holding off the hiss using mundane objects with supernatural properties. It’s a comically difficult job, and the occasional dialogue quips heard during my session make fun of the absurdity of it all. While blasting odd, alien pods sprouting from the walls, one character yells, “Is it true you can’t get overtime if you’re salaried? What kind of crap is that?”
This lighthearted tone permeates every aspect of the game. Director Mike Kayatta says that if Control is 80 percent atmospheric horror and 20 percent absurdity (numbers he says are arbitrary), FBC: Firebreak flips that ratio, instead leaning into the silliness of it all. “How do we keep that flavor but change the depth?” he says. “In other words, we wanted to lean into some of the more absurd aspects, like the shower, right?”
The shower he references is the game’s method of healing, an open, green closet-sized station where you can rinse off damage and status effects, from burning skin to radiation. If the power’s off, the water will be cold and slow you down. It fits perfectly fine in the world of Control, but mid-combat group showers are undeniably absurd, and the game frequently leans into it. This one mechanic is a microcosm of FBC: Firebreak: a silliness the game treats with sincerity, best enjoyed with friends.
As I, along with two other journalists set to be my teammates for the day, approach the room where we’ll be playing the demo, we pass life-size replicas of notable props in the game, including the showers. For any other game, it might’ve felt surreal and larger than life, but it actually emphasized just how mundane the objects in Control are before they come to life. Waves of sticky notes plaster the walls, obscuring portraits of Jesse Faden and Dr. Casper Darling, and it’s funny to imagine how terrifying they’ll become once I’m actually playing the game.
After some quick setups and a run-through of the game’s basic premise, we launch in. While the proper opening will have tutorials, our build is optimized to give us as much time playing the game as possible, so it’s a trial by fire. Before starting a Job, you can pick one of three Crisis Kits, which determine secondary abilities your character can use. I go for the splash kit, mainly enticed by its deployable humidifier, which you can use to heal allies. To say it came in handy is an understatement.
The first Job we play is called Hot Fix, which tasks the players with repairing overheating fans to secure an area. Like the other two Jobs, Hot Fix features intensifying waves of enemies, but outside of the occasional boss, they function as distractions rather than objectives. As my teammates and I repeatedly learned the hard way, it’s much smarter to focus on the mission goals, because if you spend too long shooting enemies, you’ll start drowning in difficult foes before you ever get the opportunity to escape. After we repair the generators, a task accomplished by pressing the bumpers on the controller in the order they appear on screen, we retreat to the elevator and escape to safety.
The whole experience takes six minutes and could have been cut in half if we had known what we were doing. There are ways to attempt longer levels, but the option to play in short bursts was an important part of the game’s design.
“We’re a bunch of middle-aged dads, you know?” lead designer Anssi Hyytiäinen says. “You have time restrictions and so on. […] I start a game, and if a session takes an hour, I just can’t do it.”
Kayatta reinforces the emphasis on respecting the player’s time. “There’s a million games out there,” he says. “They’re so good, and I think it’s so difficult to say the strategy for combating that is to [make] something that requires even more of your time. We’re trying to take literally the full opposite approach of Fortnite and say we are going to take up only as much time as you want to give us. You want to come in, play the content that we have, and go out? I hope you stay, but if you don’t want to, cool. Go play something else.”
Difficulty is determined by two factors in Firebreak: Clearance Level and Threat Level. The latter determines how dangerous enemies are, but the former determines how many zones you must complete, and, ultimately, the length of your run. If you want a quick, intense experience, you can lower the Clearance Level and crank up the Threat Level. Each job caps out at three zones, with further difficulty levels introducing Corrupted Items, which we faced off against in the next mode, Paper Chase.
Unlike Hot Fix’s handful of clearly marked objectives, Paper Chase’s main goal covers the entire level – to proceed to the next zone, you need to destroy as many of the yellow sticky notes that coat the area’s walls and floors as possible. It plays a little like a reverse-Splatoon, where you clean surfaces off, rather than ink them. At Clearance Level 4, we also have to deal with a floating snare drum, which flies around the level and makes all the enemies move faster. Luckily, my teammates and I also move and shoot faster, but with our unaltered reaction speeds, it’s in our best interest to destroy the drum as quickly as possible. Hindsight is 20/20; while I now know it should have been our highest priority, we failed to locate it, making our lives much harder.
Despite our struggles (and ultimate demise), Paper Chase is Firebreak at its finest. To borrow a sentiment mentioned in one of the game’s earlier trailers, it’s a mode that could only exist in this game, and while the sticky notes decorating the set didn’t haunt me before my demo, they certainly haunted me after. Bullets can destroy them, but they’re best eliminated by combining the Jump and Splash Kits. When I got an area wet, my teammate could shock it with his secondary, the Electro-Kinetic Charge Impactor, clearing out large areas quickly. The aesthetic itself of swarming sticky notes is also instantly iconic, fitting seamlessly into Control’s “haunted office” vibe.
Unfortunately, when we reached Paper Chase’s boss on our next attempt, it was under frustrating circumstances. After struggling with the sped up enemies, we lowered the Clearance Level to 3 and the Threat Level to easy to see the end of the area without issue. However, a glitch in the build made it so all enemies were permanently sped up, arguably even more difficult than before, despite the lower Threat Level. When we finally reached Sticky Ricky, a swirling colossus of sticky notes, we were constantly dying and struggled to figure out how to damage him. The Day One build should have this issue resolved, and with proper tutorialization, it won’t be as big of a struggle for us to beat the boss, but it was still a notable low point of the experience.
The final mode was Ground Control, which we tackled on Clearance Level 2. In this mode, you must shoot open black, pulsating pods growing out of the walls and ceiling to harvest leech pearls, radioactive basketball-sized objects that damage you if you hold them for too long. It’s my least favorite of the modes we play (the hunt for leech pearls gets stale fairly quickly), but it also goes by the fastest, now that we’re glitch-free and have upgraded weapons and gear.
Some of the last things you can unlock for each kit are their Altered Augments, a powerful ability to unleash when the time is right. The splash kit transforms the water cannon into a fire cannon, but you have to be careful where you point it; Firebreak has friendly fire active. The jump kit’s Altered Augment is an electric gnome, which summons a terrifying lightning storm that harms anyone within range. I know it was my ally’s tool, but it terrified me more than anything else in the game. I don’t know if it’s the erratic movement or the soulless eyes, but each time it was summoned, I felt like Donald Glover in his gif-worthy episode of Community.
FBC: Firebreak is weird, both aesthetically in-game and as a product, but after playing, my hesitation at this weirdness has been replaced by enthusiasm. Online shooters are a competitive field, but Remedy isn’t interested in competing – it hopes to coexist.
“It depends on how you define success, for sure,” Kayatta says. “I mean, if you’re trying to take over the world and make a gazillion dollars, yeah, you better have Fortnite on your hands. […] We want to make something that players will like and that will serve a wider goal for us also, of showing people Remedy is more than these atmospheric single-player experiences.”
I look forward to more time with FBC: Firebreak when it launches later this year on June 17.
