FBC: Firebreak was provided by Remedy Entertainment for review. Thank you!
Whenever Remedy Entertainment makes a new game, I am always ready to check it out. They have hooked me time and time again with Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control, so I was very intrigued to see what they would do with FBC: Firebreak. The co-op first-person shooter has a lot of interesting ideas and is set within Control’s universe, so I was ready to see if it would hold up. While the core gameplay is fleshed out and enjoyable, it is lacking in areas that make it hard to fully recommend right now.
As a shooter, it’s important to make sure the gameplay is tight and exciting, and I feel FBC: Firebreak achieves that most of the time. The guns feel unique and weighty, movement is solid, and the abilities you have can help turn the tide. Jumping did feel a little off at times, but for the most part, running around and shooting enemies while completing objectives was just a lot of fun. I also appreciate the more untraditional nature of these objectives, like collecting leech balls, destroying sticky notes, and fixing some fans.
I love the weird vibes that the game exudes in general. From the weird weapons and objectives to the weapons and locations, it has this intriguing vibe that defines it. It makes sense, especially when looking at previous games like Control and Alan Wake, and it helps FBC: Firebreak stand out from the more generic first-person shooters.
However, the game is severely lacking in content. At release, there are only five jobs, and while they can be modified to increase difficulty, there isn’t enough randomness in them to keep it interesting past a couple of runs. Playing with a group of friends does make it more satisfying, but it still ended up feeling predictable because the objectives rarely changed. The added masses of enemies from higher difficulties did add hectic firefights that were a blast to coordinate with my teammates, but it didn’t do enough to keep me wanting to come back for more.
There are two other jobs that are coming out throughout the year, so Remedy does have more plans to change this, but there aren't enough random variables to keep the five jobs fun to replay over and over. I would also say that this makes the game boring to play alone. While it is possible, and I did play all the jobs solo as well, I found myself not feeling motivated to keep playing unless I had my crew with me.
As for customization, there are three main areas we can change in our loadout. We have three different kits, all of which have their own abilities, and we can swap out a primary weapon and grenade. The kits’ abilities include a wrench to quickly repair broken electronics, a water gun to douse friends and enemies, and an impactor to restore electricity to different modules. We can also unlock and attach different perks to augment our actions, but overall, it's quite basic. We can also change our appearance with different outfits, which is a nice touch with some interesting fits.
The progression also feels a little difficult to get behind. To unlock new weapons, outfits, and gear, you’ll collect Requisitions through your jobs and unlock them individually. I would have been fine with the system, but it takes a long time to unlock the things you want to. Each page of rewards are locked until you unlock a specific amount of the previous page, and it takes longer to earn these requisitions than I’d like. The forced pathway of rewards to unlock ended up discouraging me, since the ones I really wanted took so much longer to redeem due to them being on later pages. Playing with friends on higher difficulties will net more requisitions, so that will speed things up a bit, but it still takes longer to get to the stuff I wanted.
In the end, after playing through, I just found myself wanting more. This would have been a great early access title, but for a full-priced, fully released game, it's hard to justify the cost. There's a solid core here with some great ideas, gorgeous visuals, and interesting mechanics, but there isn't enough content to utilize all of them to an enjoyable extent. The future of FBC: Firebreak looks bright, but as of right now, I would consider buying the game to be an investment.
Regardless of content, it is just a blast to play on the Steam Deck.
Ahead of its release, Remedy Entertainment had a live stream where they confirmed that they are optimizing FBC: Firebreak for the Steam Deck, and now that I have had a chance to play it, I can happily say they truly did. The default graphical settings look great while keeping a solid 30 FPS. It honestly works so well that I didn't feel tempted to go into my settings and try changing things.
However, I feel like there should be no changes. While I understand wanting to bring the framerate up or remove upscaling, the game can get extremely performance-heavy when playing with the highest difficulty, which can bring out tons of enemies. At the default settings, it still holds to 30 FPS, with some slight drops here and there, and some very heavy battery drain. Still, it largely holds steady, enough to make the entire experience feel smooth and very playable.
This could be in part thanks to how each job is more contained instead of open-ended. All of the jobs you have are in more contained areas, which means there's a more limited render range. Even with 40-50 enemies on screen, it's still all in one area instead of spread out across a sprawling map, which I would say helps a lot.
Overall, I would say Remedy did some magical optimization. The game looks wonderful, apart from some shadow aliasing here and there, and it sticks to a steady framerate even when things get heavy. It's tough to play first-person shooters on the Deck with limited power, but this is one shooter I can fully get behind playing on the go. Remedy deserves praise here, because FBC: Firebreak is wonderfully playable on the Steam Deck, even with tons of enemies on screen and shit is hitting the fan:
In the settings, you can choose to toggle crouch, sprint, and aiming down sight, enable cross-platform matchmaking, change sensitivity of camera, invert controls, change keybindings, enable subtitles and change size, and modify volume output.
The game supports 16:10 resolutions, as well as cloud saves and controller support. There are HDR settings and it does recognize the Steam Deck OLED screen. I can also confirm that graphical settings are no saved on the cloud, so your desktop PC can have higher quality than your Steam Deck and it won't interfere.
FBC: Firebreak has a lot of great elements to it, but not enough content to keep it going. The core gunplay is great, and I had a blast playing the wacky 5 jobs with friends in the gorgeous environments of the federal agency, but the lack of random variables in the jobs and linear progression system made it hard to stay interested. Still, I have hope that with future updates, this is going to be a great co-op shooter to enjoy.
It's also amazing how well it looks and runs on the Steam Deck, and I think that's saying a lot. It deserves praise for its optimization, and I can happily say its one that shouldn't be any problem playing on the go.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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FBC: Firebreak has a lot of good ideas, but the lack of content and linear progression stifle what could be a great experience. However, it's a joy to play on the Steam Deck.
