A siren echoes through the Executive Sector of the Oldest House. One member of this Firebreak crew has activated a Safe Room – it's both a signal to the director upstairs that progress is being made down here in the depths, and a foothold for the team should this crisis spiral any further out of control. This critical act also has the adverse effect of violently stirring the Hiss from their slumber; like dumping kerosene on an ant hill, the insects burst forth in number.
"The first question that we ask ourselves when making creative decisions is whether it's something that could only exist within the Control universe"
Another member of the crew slots shells into a corroded shotgun, taking up a defensive position in a room being gradually engulfed by fire. A third desperately attempts to knock a decontamination shower into working condition with a wrench. More noise, but if they aren't able to wash those sticky notes off of their suit, the hordes of Hiss crawling through the corridors will be the least of the squad's problems. The siren stops. Water flows. Bloodshed. This is just another day for volunteers of the FBC: Firebreak initiative.
OUT OF CONTROL
It's been six years since Control. Six years since we last made contact with Jesse Faden. The embattled director of the Federal Bureau of Control was able to contain a powerful paranatural threat but failed to eradicate it entirely. "The Hiss is still in the Oldest House, and the lockdown can't be lifted as long as any trace of it remains," she said back in 2019. "I'm working on a solution with my management team, but there's still a long road ahead."
We have no idea what's happened since then. With Control 2 having only just entered full production, and still several years from release, you may wonder what extradimensional crises have been unfolding within the Bureau's headquarters. FBC: Firebreak will present a part of the answer when it launches as a new game for summer 2025 on PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X.
"The Hiss, it turns out, are kind of like ants," says Mike Kayatta, game director. "You may want to kill them all, but it's impossible – in a war of attrition, the Hiss will always win." With growing shortages of critical resources, Director Faden is forced to authorize the Firebreak Initiative in response. "It's an initiative of first responders. Ordinary employees of the FBC who haven't left their place of work for six years, volunteering to get sent into dangerous crises across the Oldest House."
When you take up arms to defend the Oldest House in FBC: Firebreak, you won't do so with any channeled parautilitarian abilities for protection. You and two friends will take on the role of pencil pushers who do "bureaucratic business for the bureau by day, who then suit up once they finish their shift to get a job done for the FBC," says Kayatta. The work isn't pretty, but somebody has to do it.
What you'll be undertaking is extradimensional in nature. FBC: Firebreak may be the first cooperative first-person shooter from Remedy Entertainment in its 30-year history, but the studio isn't sacrificing any of its trademark flair for the metaphysical as it detours from the third-person action that has defined the best Remedy games. "The first question that we ask ourselves when making creative decisions is whether it's something that could only exist within the Control universe," says Kayatta.
"Sticky notes have decided to propagate into the thousands, eat people, and bring them back as terrifying monsters. So it's all pretty standard, really"
At our Future Games Show: Spring Showcase, Remedy unveiled one of the many 'Jobs' you'll undertake in FBC: Firebreak. The mission is called Paper Chase, and it has undeniably strange parameters. "I mean, I'm not sure why you're asking me about the situation," laughs Kayatta. "It just so happens that sticky notes have decided to propagate into the thousands, eat people, consume their corpses, and bring them back as terrifying, shuffling monsters. So it's all pretty standard, really."
What is "pretty standard" for Remedy is pretty strange for almost everybody else. Every Job in FBC: Firebreak is set within a unique location inside of the Oldest House. There will be some returning sectors from Control and some brand new ones too, each with its own tailored crisis and objectives to resolve. "Each Job has a different mechanic associated with it. Sometimes they have different enemies and conditions – status effects which affect you in different ways," says Kayatta.
In Paper Chase, you're ordered to clear up a growing infestation of rogue sticky notes. A relatively simple cleanup escalates as you shift between the three zones that make up the sector. Destroy enough sticky notes to progress into zone two, you'll soon find denser volumes of Hiss joined by corpses reanimated by the sticky notes. As you tangle with the phenomenon, sticky notes can start covering your body and obscuring your vision, eventually turning you into a Shuffler unless steps are taken to reverse course. One less Firebreak member reporting for duty, and one more Hiss for the FBC to fight.
By zone three, you and your compatriots will be battling Sticky Ricky, a hulking mass of sticky notes. Quick teamwork is required to overcome the behemoth, with Firebreak teams shifting between pumping bullets into the beast, activating stasis generators, and picking each other up when they fall. "The deeper you go into a sector, the more intense the crisis becomes," adds Kayatta. "Each Job kind of works like this in a sense, where you're going in and winding towards the heart of the crisis."
Get in, get the Job done, and get out – and the FBC really only cares about two out of the three. "All they care about is whether the job ultimately gets done, and that does not include whether or not you survive," says Kayatta. "So there are two layers to beating every Job. One is, did you do what the FBC wanted you to do? That's going to reward your reputation within the organization. But the second is more personal, did you get out of the crisis alive with everything you found and survived with?"
Remedy is yet to confirm how many Jobs FBC: Firebreak will ship with, but it's clear from what I've seen of the game so far behind-closed-doors that the studio is pushing to imbue each of these missions with its trademark flair for high-strangeness. The objectives are weird, the combat looks intense, and the visual fidelity is out of control. Remedy may be new players on the online co-op shooter scene, but there's every reason to be confident that the studio will be able to pull this off.
VOLUNTEERS WANTED
Session-based multiplayer may be a new avenue of creative expression for Remedy but the agile 50-person development team – a blend of new hires with genre expertise and long-serving studio veterans – working to bring FBC: Firebreak to life appears to be rising to the challenge. Movement looks tight and measured, combat is cinematic by design, and there's an outrageous degree of visual depth and fidelity on display. Firebreak may be a 'mid-priced' title, but Remedy is leveraging the Northlight Engine – which powered both Control and Alan Wake 2 – to great effect.
Of course, it takes more than a sumptuous graphical and mechanical design to survive (let alone thrive in) the online co-op market in the modern era. That's why Remedy is leveraging new gameplay systems to create "emergent gameplay and emergent moments" that will keep players coming back for more.
One example is how Remedy has chosen to handle customization. "We knew from the beginning that we wanted a lot of depth in Firebreak, but we weren't going to go down the min-maxing path," says Kayatta. Weapons are customizable, allowing you to swap out attachments to better suit your playstyle preferences, while armor is purely cosmetic. You'll also have the ability to equip Altered Items to help turn the tide of engagements. Still, the key differential here are Research Perks, central to the progression system as you invest earned experience.
"We have almost 50 perks inside of the game that all change the way you play. It could be that if you shoot a bullet and miss, there's a chance it will reappear back in your clip – a handy perk stolen from the Luck and Probability department. It might be that you've put Black Rock in your socks so that every time you jump from a height, a little cloud of this stuff comes out and disorients enemies," he says. What's key here is that you can equip up to three perks at any one time, and there's no restriction on stacking them – should you accrue the XP required to unlock a perk multiple times over.
"All of our playable post-launch content, like Jobs, will always be free. You can buy cosmetics with money if you want to, but they won't have any sort of in-game effect"
"You can buy each of the perks up to three times. If you put one perk on your character, you get the base effect. Equip two of the same, and you get a stronger version of the effect. Equip a third, and you actually start emanating the effect to others," he says.
Resonance Build is a neat concept, a layer of depth that naturally suggests collaboration with the other two players in your party. "Imagine three people all emanating their effects to each other – you get some pretty chaotic and interesting things happening as a result, especially as the effects kind of go in and out depending on how close you are to your teammates."
Remedy says that it designed its Research Perk system to encourage experimentation, and to be "universally interesting so that you never feel like you need to play in a certain way." To further this, different perks can be assigned to each of the three Crisis Kits available – saved loadouts that you can also modify with different grenades and primary weapons. "We give you three Crisis Kits, so you can kind of have these presets to choose between while on a Job," Kayatta says. You can change which loadout you have equipped once you die, as a replacement Firebreak volunteer joins the fray.
How you ultimately choose to deploy these Crisis Kits is up to you and your two crewmates. There's also Altered Items to consider, a super that can be deployed to drastically impact your utility in deadly situations – although Remedy isn't quite ready to detail how these parautilities will work just yet.
Instead, the studio is only too happy to discuss the scale of challenge you may face in the Oldest House, and why such tools may be needed. FBC: Firebreak gives you the ability to dictate both the Threat and Clearance level of a Job – modifiers that impact combat intensity and mission complexity.
"Threat level you can kind of think about as difficulty," he says. "How many enemies, how often do they spawn, and in what form?" As for the Clearance level, Kayatta explains that "every job is split into three zones, and as you complete objectives you get to progress deeper into the crisis; Clearance lets you decide how deep you want to go."
Crisis Kits and perks, Clearance and Threat level, this combination of modifiers speaks directly to Remedy's approach to replayability and longevity. The studio isn't utilizing procedural generation to alter the shape of its missions or levels, nor in leveraging battle passes to lock you into the ecosystem. Instead, FBC: Firebreak is being presented as a live-service shooter with compelling core attractions, handing you the tools to vary the challenge and scale of play yourself.
Crisis Kits are generally based around playstyles. The Jump Kit is an electricity-focused loadout for those enamored with crowd-control, equipped with a Electro-Kinetic Charge Impactor tool which disperses electricity, and a BOOMbox item which taunts nearby enemies. The Fix Kit is a melee-focused build, complete with a massive wrench and swivel turret which needs to be manually assembled. And then there's the Splash Kit, a water-focused design that uses a Crank-Operated Fluidic Ejector to both extinguish fires and impart status effects on enemies, and a Humidifier which floods areas and heals crewmates within a proximity.
"We were never going to be able to support something like a linear campaign that constantly introduces new chapters, creating this indefinite story and factory of content. That does work for some games, but for us, it wasn't going to work while maintaining a lot of the pick-up and play accessibility that we wanted," says Kayatta, who is keen to stress that Remedy is ultimately building a shooter you can easily dip in and out of with friends with over time without any fear of missing out.
Kayatta adds : "We've tried to find a balance between something that can be accessible but also really deep and fulfilling at higher skill levels, like once you have more stuff available to you."
Remedy isn't ready to divulge exactly how it plans to support FBC: Firebreak beyond launch. The studio is still aligning its post-release plans, although Kayatta is happy to confirm that "all of our playable post-launch content, like Jobs, will always be free." You will be able to "buy cosmetics with money if you want to, but they won't have any sort of in-game effect," he says, adding that "it was really important to us that everybody has access to the same pool of content."
BETTER TOGETHER
Success isn't guaranteed for online shooters these days. For one to flourish it seems another has to fail – take Helldivers 2 and Concord as a recent example. And you need only look at the difficult journeys experienced by games like Destiny 2 and Overwatch 2 to see that even titans can fall. But Remedy does seem to be setting down the right path. Full crossplay support between PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X is already confirmed for launch, so too will it be released into the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate library and the PlayStation Plus catalog for Extra and Premium members.
The decision to focus on a handful of well-made maps, missions, and weapon kits appears to be a calculated risk, a bet that a focus on quality and consistency will win out over an endless array of regenerating situations. I'm particularly enamored by the way Remedy has been able to harness its propensity for weird ideas and channel it into the online co-op arena. My favorite example is the decontamination showers, big enough for three and mission-critical for survival.
"The showers are where you heal in the game, but of course, they are broken when you enter a sector. You've got to go and repair its valve, otherwise, you just get a leaky drip of water instead of a spray – this will still heal you, but it's very slow and unfulfilling. And unless you've got the heater working, the water will be cold – you're going to walk out of it shivering and be slowed down," says Kayatta. "You could stand in a fire to heat yourself back up, but this will damage you. There are a lot of these kinds of things inside of FBC: Firebreak; different ways that otherwise normal effects and elements are intersecting."
It's a smart idea. One that not only encourages collaboration between your party but has a risk-reward element built into its design. It is also, above all else, exceptionally fun as a concept. There's a lot still to see of FBC: Firebreak, and I'm keen to see how it handles when the game launches this summer, but for now I'd say that Remedy is moving in the right direction for what is undoubtedly its wildest experiment yet.
FBC: Firebreak will launch this summer for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, where it will also land in the Game Pass and and PlayStation Plus Game Catalog ecosystems. If you'd like to learn more about the game, wishlist FBC: Firebreak on Steam.
Explore our Big Preview of FBC: Firebreak
Following the confirmation of a summer release window in our Future Games Show: Spring Showcase, we'll be diving into all things FBC: Firebreak this week. Stick with GamesRadar+ in the days ahead as we bring new gameplay details and more about the game following our visit to Remedy.
