A bold approach to the concept of work marks this game out as a singular enterprise.
On my best runs, with the best accidental match-ups, I’ve been the watering can guy. I’ll deploy alongside two far more talented players, and they’ll fix machinery and fight the hordes while I handle the watering. I’ll put out ground-based fires to allow for freedom of movement and to stop enemies being enraged by flames. I’ll put out any fires on my allies when they accidentally set light to themselves, so they don’t have to race back to the nearest shower block.
This works, until it doesn’t work. I’ll be watering away and then I’ll round a corner and an elite baddie will pop up. Oh, Christ, I’ll think. It’s RACHEL DAVIES. (Elite baddies in Firebreak always come with names plucked out of some Platonic HR database.) Rachel Davies will be on fire and she’ll be floating and laying down hellish covering damage. Monsters will spawn beneath her and we’ll be over-run and no more machinery will get fixed. And there’s nothing that the watering can man can do now except die as efficiently as possible.
A step back: Control was a fairly normal game that wanted you to think it was weird. Underneath the stylish disarray, it offered a pleasantly traditional blend of shooting and physic-based magic powers, and it let you loose against a range of entertainingly predictable enemies in close confines. FBC: Firebreak is a Control spin-off, but get this. It’s a weird game that wants you to think it’s normal. On the surface it’s a run-based co-op shooter that should fit in somewhere between Helldivers 2 and something like REPO. But underneath…?
Once again we’re in the Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, an agency that deals with anything that’s traditionally accompanied by a theremin when it turns up in a TV show. The Oldest House was absolutely the best thing about Control, a game fairly filled with good things, so it’s lovely to be back. Polished concrete! Wood- and glass-lined conference rooms! Weird Lovecraftian mines with slate roofs and horrible things growing in the dark. You get the idea.
In Firebreak, you take the role of a bunch of endlessly expendable janitors, and the missions often take you into parts of the Oldest House that were one-shot gags in Control. That room filled with Post-it notes? It’s now a mission, in which you have to clean up an infestation of Post-its and maybe fight a giant Post-it monster. That furnace, whose staging was so luminously clever you almost felt your eyebrows turning to cinder in its presence? That’s another mission where you have to fix up machinery and step inside the turbines to get them venting again.
There are five of these missions and they’re available in various configurations in terms of length and difficulty. But they all work the same way in essence: there’s something annoying and technical and genuinely job-like for you and two other players to get done, whether it’s clearing something up, fixing something or loading something. There will be a substance to avoid getting covered with – Post-its, strangely delicious looking toxic pink goo. And there will be Hiss, Control’s spectral enemies, that warp in now and then to give you a really hard time when you’re doing it.
The Hiss and the jobs themselves go some way to explaining Firebreak’s bizarre load outs. Alongside a range of guns and grenades, the best of which are unlockable, you also drop into levels with one of three kits. One of these fires out water and is the best. Another sends jolts of electricity. A third is basically just a wrench. The water puts out fire and makes enemies wet. The electricity charges machinery in an instant and can shock things. The wrench fixes machinery in seconds and allows you to do a bit of general bashing.
Firebreak wants you to work out how these kits work in concert with one another – and ideally you’ll work this out to your enormous surprise in the middle of a fight. Spray Hiss with water and then get your buddy to zap them? Massive electrical damage. That’s a combo, but there are loads of other elemental tricks, and not all of them come from the kits themselves. I was about five hours in when a friend told me I could use a level’s zipline to put out flames, for example. Wind beats fire. Nice.
If this sounds like it adds up to a very chaotic game, well, it certainly does. Standard weaponry, randomly spawning foes, elemental chaos, a mission based on drudgery. To give things a little more focus each level has a bunch of stations you can keep running – respawn points, weapons restockers, a shower block for getting rid of goo or Post-its. What this in turn means is that you’re in a multiplayer game where you’re all working on the same objective, but randomly breaking off when your own needs require it. We’re all tackling that pink goo, but I’m out of bullets, or I’m so caked in the stuff I can’t move. At such a moment it seems almost overkill to mention there are deployable gadgets and ultimates for each kit, but there are. The wrench’s ultimate is a piggy bank, for example, and you really don’t want to be around when it breaks.
I should declare my hand here: I don’t mind drudgery that much. In real life my favourite job ever was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and I’d possibly still be doing that if gentle hearing loss hadn’t made me realise that’s a bad idea – lots of Firebreak-style elemental combinations can occur when a KP can’t hear “BEHIND YOU!” – but drudgery in a game has to be carefully used. Because Firebreak uses a weird system where levels can get both longer and more aggressive depending on your settings, that careful use I’m talking about goes into the garbage disposal.
The best runs I’ve played – the best times I’ve had with Firebreak – were hectic and brief. The level wasn’t too long, but it also wasn’t too quiet. We were working frantically to do our jobs and clear out Hiss, and the Hiss weren’t having it. Attacks from all sides, and also corruptions in play. These are randomisers you can switch on and off that might change the basis of a level a bit. There’s a haunted traffic light that makes you slow down (I think), and there’s a flying wrench that’s constantly damaging machinery. All good when the Hiss are strobing in and the end is in reach.
The worst levels I’ve played though were either knackeringly long: load this thing, load it again, get it on a shuttle and then stand by for the launch before making it to the exit. Or they were too quiet. Again, another work anecdote. When my wife was a trainee nurse, her favourite shifts were in A and E because your feet never touched the ground. You went in, had a Red Bull, dealt with the chaos, and before you had time for another Red Bull you were headed home. Firebreak at its worst can be like an endless shift on a very sleepy ward. I’ll be fixing furnaces forever, with only the rarest case of Hiss to try my ultimate out on.
Beyond all this stuff is the general business of unlockables and perks to buy and pick between as you level up, along with more perk slots to use as you get more powerful. There are some entertaining guns in there, along with fun sprays and those ultimates, which are always money in the bank, but the game is held ransom a little to whether you’re going to be stuck doing something that’s no fun for a knackeringly long time.
Even here Firebreak can surprise you, though. Last night I foolishly cranked Firebreak up to the most hectic settings and did one of the pink room runs and it was glorious – just me and someone else, constantly busy, constantly over-stretched, looking after each other as wave after wave came down. The game’s unreasonableness was charming then genuinely thrilling. And those synergies emerged – I would chuck water over everything and my pal would add electricity and we’d be zapping a whole dance floor of baddies. The length of the mission was still too much, but it didn’t matter because we were doing something totally unfeasible. We were working away in the impossibility mines and it was a good time.
And that’s the thing: a game this weird really needs a good player base, and here Firebreak has smashed it. This is one of the most generous and patient communities out there. Remember: a lot of the tasks here are annoying and hard, and need you to divide up and take unglamorous roles. Well, players endlessly rise to the occasion and I’m left with so many stories of kindness, from the guy who laid down pings for me all the way back to the escape elevator to another who waited at the elevator for a full minute for his comrades to come back.
What a bizarre, improbable thing this is. If Control was all about a fairly standard action game with world-beating set dressing, it feels like Firebreak has worked backwards from that set dressing to build all its actual ideas from. It really is a game about fixing furnaces and picking up Post-its, but it wants you to do it with strangers, and, heck, why not have a little interference from the Hiss as you go? It’s pretty much Control fan fiction – and I mean that even if you don’t get the mission in which you’re fixing giant fans.
Code for FBC: Firebreak was provided by the publisher.
