Preview: FBC Firebreak is Control meets COD Zombies

2019’s Control is an electrifying rampage through the FBC’s Oldest House. The FBC is a government branch that explicitly handles supernatural phenomena with all the bureaucracy that comes with being a boring government agency – only the fax machine might try to kill you if something goes wrong. It’s a hotbed of paranormal activity, and Control’s protagonist Jesse Faden utilizes her own unusual abilities – including telekinetic attacks and the ability to hover – to combat the mysteries of the Oldest House. But your player characters in FBC: Firebreak enjoy no such luxuries.

FBC director Jesse Faden has tasked Hank Flowers with leading the new Firebreak Initiative, and as a Firebreaker, you must take care of the various crises happening within the Oldest House until lockdown can be lifted. This will include FBC employees who have been taken by the Hiss – a mind-controlling entity – and beasts made of yellow sticky notes.

If you’ve played Control, you’ll be familiar with the brutalist architecture of the Oldest House, and the absurdist apparitions that can appear within, but FBC: Firebreak forces a new perspective on things. You’re not alone, for one, as Firebreakers go into missions with a team at their side ready to take on foes. You’re basically a nameless FBC employee who’s just managed to survive this long, but you have access to a variety of Crisis Kits that will help make up for the gap in ability between yourself and the monsters you’ll be battling.

Unlike Jesse Faden, you’re a boots-on-the-ground normal person – you won’t be levitating and flinging desks around the building – so the Crisis Kits are necessary. The Jump, Fix, and Splash Kits are the ones we know about, which focus on mobility, melee impacts, and elemental abilities respectively. Perks are another way to improve your chances, and stacking multiple versions of the same perk can enhance its effects or even apply them to the whole squad. The Firebreakers might not be supernatural super soldiers, but they can still use some of the research to enhance their abilities while on the job.

There’s a decent amount of variables and options present in FBC: Firebreak, but for a Remedy Entertainment fan, there’s not too much to get excited about in the footage we’ve seen. Yes, this is a canon return to the Oldest House, and the game will dive into what has happened in the six years since Control. Knowing Remedy’s recent games, it may even have a few ties to the likes of Alan Wake or an allusion to Max Payne. But the on-screen action is so different from what we expect from the studio.

The game is played from a first-person perspective, and it’s a much more traditional shooter than what you might expect. A lot of what we’ve seen feels familiar, and not just in terms of the environment. The gameplay isn’t too far removed from Call of Duty Zombies or Redfall. There are lots of corrupted humans for you to fight your way through, in addition to large boss monsters that you can shoot at repeatedly to watch their health bar slowly decrease.

How long you can stick with a concept like this depends on what the game does to introduce new and interesting challenges (and the friends you can bring into the game with you). Luckily, this is where FBC: Firebreak is doing things mostly right. It’s not free-to-play, but it will launch on day one on Game Pass for PC and Xbox, in addition to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium tiers, and it will feature full cross-play. Assuming you and your friends already pay for one of the most popular game subscription services, you probably already have access and can drop in on launch with a full team of three, regardless of your chosen platform.

It’s impossible to judge a game like FBC: Firebreak until you go hands-on with a group of friends and get a feel for the long-term gameplay loop, but it’s also impossible to deny that it’s enticing. The Oldest House is a genuinely memorable and fascinating location to discover, and as long as the team manages to produce a variety of threats and challenges that feel good to fight, it could be incredible. We’ll be able to find out for ourselves when FBC: Firebreak launches this Summer on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.