Remedy’s FBC: Firebreak will keep you busy exterminating the Hiss | hands-on preview

I played hands-on with multiple missions in a preview Remedy Entertainment‘s FBC: Firebreak game. You’ll spend so much time exterminating monsters known as The Hiss that you’ll feel like a rodent exterminator.

It’s a quirky game with beautiful triple-A graphics and some quirky humorous elements, like the presence of tons of paper sticky notes through some of the levels. It’s a co-op first-person shooter game, with online play for three players. It’s a nice change for Remedy, as I love its narrative-based games — I’ve played every one of them — but this game has a kind of short and intense Left4Dead feel to it.

FBC: Firebreak is set in the universe of Remedy’s Control. It is set within the world of a mysterious federal agency under assault by extradimensional forces. You have to battle through hordes of different types of reality-warping anomalies and otherworldly monsters with your two friends / two other players, customize your gear and level up as you fight back against this ever-growing threat.

For six years after the events of Control, the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a bureaucratic government agency that deals with the paranatural world, has been trapped in its headquarters, a shifting, extradimensional office building known as the Oldest House.

This self-imposed lockdown was in response to an invasion of the Hiss, a harmful resonance from another dimension with the ability to infect humans and turn them into chaotic monsters. Since it began, no one and nothing has been allowed in or out, leading to growing shortages of critical resources.

The FBC’s director, Jesse Faden, decided that the FBC could not win the fight by force alone and so appointed Hank Flowers to lead the newly formed Firebreak Initiative with a mission to manage the strange and dangerous crises appearing across the Oldest House until the lockdown can be lifted.

FBC: Firebreak is a game that is easy to get into with your friends and does not feature aheavy “grind.” The focus is on pure, moment-to-moment fun with friends when you have anhour or two to kill, Remedy said.

The game has a collection of 36 unlockable premium cosmetic items (weapon skins, sprays, armor sets) that will be immediately available in-game at launch. As there are no pre-orders for the game, the Deluxe Edition won’t be visible on store pages until release day. The base game is $40, while the deluxe edition is $50. The title will be out on the PC (Steam and Epic Store), Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 on June 17.

The gameplay

I was able to join a few matches without having any practice. I took the submachine gun, another team member grabbed a shotgun and the last took a revolver (I’m not sure why). We had to grab some items, get some things done in the fairly big levels, and then wipe out the The Hiss when they attacked in a horde.

The Hiss were easy to dispatch in some ways. If I hit them with the machine gun a few times, they lost health and then burst into bright red colors and vaporized. It was quite satisfying to see that happen over and over. But they came in large numbers and I felt like I had a slow pea shooter compared to guns in a game like Call of Duty. The submachine gun made a kind of popping noise when it fired of a shot and it felt like it ought to be operating at three times the speed.

But The Hiss weren’t that bright. They attacked in large numbers in waves, and we held them off without any practice. We also had faster acceleration of our leveling up that helped us. The maps had points where we could take showers to get rid of a kind of radioactivity that dragged our health down over time. We also had to frequently go back to ammo depots and flee to shelters when we could.

I enjoyed the variety of the missions, called Jobs, which were quite repeatable.

Post-Launch

Two additional Jobs (missions) are planned for 2025 alongside other content, with more coming in 2026. All post-launch playable content will be free to all players.

Requisitions are sets of unlockable gear and cosmetics in FBC: Firebreak. Play the game, earn currency (Lost Assets), and use them to unlock what you want. A standard Requisition is a free set of items that can include weapons, equipment and cosmetic items including armor pieces and sprays that players can unlock with in-game currency. Play the game, unlock stuff.

Classified Requisitions are a set of premium cosmetic items such as armor sets, sprays and weapon skins. Classified Requisitions are bought with real money. The items contained in Classified Requisitions have no impact on gameplay. There are upgradeable Crisis Kits and more.

There will be five Jobs in the game when it is released, and I played three of them with a couple of other compadres in the press.

Hot Fix

This is set in a paranatural furnace in the maintenance sector of the Oldest House. It has broken its blast seal and is flooding the sector with a growing, unnatural heat. Firebreakers must repair heat transfer fans across the sector and feed the furnace with Black Rock powder to neutralize it and then repair the blast seals. I liked this level but I always had to keep turning around as The Hiss enemies would swarm us and eventually bring us down by pecking at our backs with their relatively weak weapons. I ran out of ammo fast and had to get to the ammo boxes often. What really helped was when I was able to stock multiple grenades, as those grenades could take out tons of The Hiss at one toss.

Paper Chase

The paranatural sticky note population has replicated to a critical volume, consuming members of the FBC and turning them into shufflers. Firebreakers must destroy the rogue sticky notes and finally confront the sticky note entity nicknamed ‘Sticky Ricky’ to get the situation under control again. In this level, there were bigger enemies who took more firepower to bring down. It took so much time that the weaker Hiss became more annoying as they pecked at us enough to take us out. We got used to going down on our knees and then waiting for another player to come and heal us and put us back into the fray.

Ground Control

A swarm of paranatural Astral Leeches is irradiating the Quarry, threatening the FBC’s critical Black Rock mining operations. Firebreak must kill leeches across the Quarry to uncover pearls capable of emitting lethal radiation, load them into containment shuttle and move it to a launch site. Once the shuttle is loaded into the launcher, Firebreak must fuel the system and finally launch the payload into orbit.

This mission was the longest and it was the hardest to get through. It took us a couple of tries to get through it, and I was never sure if we did a good job getting all the pearls in the scene. Overall, I enjoyed the game, and I could appreciate the amount of repeatable gameplay you could get for the $40 base price. It has triple-A sensibilities, without the triple-A game length. And that’s a healthy thing for game studios that are trying to grab our attention for a short time. I could play this game some, but I don’t need to have it around as a live service forever.