FBC: Firebreak

I came into Firebreak ready to shoot paranatural hordes with two mates and leave satisfied. The elevator pitch lands: three-player PvE in the Control universe, Hiss everywhere, brutalist corridors, that signature Remedy weirdness baked into every corner. Then you actually play it for a few hours and the cracks show up fast. The gunplay is the clearest win here. Remedy has made shooter-adjacent games for years but never committed this hard to making the shooting itself feel good, and for the most part it does. The SMG starts soft but upgrade it through the Requisitions system using Lost Assets and it genuinely tightens up - recoil drops, the weapon starts to feel like an extension of intent rather than a random noise generator. The three Crisis Kits (Fix, Jump, and Splash) give each player a lane: the Fix Kit carries a wrench and handles environmental repairs, the Splash Kit pushes water for fire suppression and status cleansing, the Jump Kit covers verticality and aggression. Weapons transfer freely between kits, which is a sensible call - class identity lives in the tools, not in locking you out of certain guns. The perk tree goes deep, with each skill tiering from Weak through Strong up to Resonant, where maxed perks start buffing nearby teammates too. The Resonance system - where your shields only recharge when you're close to allies - forces squad cohesion in a way that doesn't feel artificial once you internalize it. The problems are harder to paper over. Firebreak launched with five jobs total. Five. You can crank difficulty modifiers and dial up Corruption levels to spawn Objects of Power that make enemies nastier, and missions do have three clearance tiers each, but you are fundamentally eating the same five meals with different seasoning. Hit registration was sloppy enough at launch that delayed markers and laggy animations broke the feedback loop that good horde shooters depend on. Enemy types - runners, shooters, heavies, flyers - blur together visually, and in a game where fast threat ID is half the strategy, that is a real problem. The UI for progression is a mess: the perk research screen rearranges icons when you unlock new things, and the dual currency loop of Lost Assets plus mission-specific samples is opaque enough that you will spend meaningful time confused about what unlocks what. There is also no in-game voice or text chat, which for a co-op game that expects tight coordination with randoms is a baffling omission. Friendly fire is always on, so bring a mic or bring friends who already have one. The Remedy DNA holds up aesthetically. The brutalist Cold War office horror of the Oldest House looks correct, the gun sounds have enough chunk to satisfy (opinions differ - some reviewers found them weak, I thought they tracked with the DIY-gear premise), and the deadpan corporate humor threading through the dialogue gives the game a tone that nothing else in the genre is doing. The Paper Chase mission, which has you destroying thousands of haunted sticky notes that culminate in a boss fight against a giant sticky note monster, is exactly the kind of deranged design touch that makes you understand why Remedy is Remedy. But moments like that are too infrequent against a backdrop of button-sequence tasks and wave clearing that lacks consequence. Post-launch, Remedy pushed two major updates - Rogue Protocol in January 2026 and Open House in March 2026 - before announcing they were wrapping new content development to redirect toward Control 2. Servers are staying up, the game had a permanent price cut to $19.99, and the Friends Pass (letting your friends play free when you own it) means the cost of getting a squad in is lower than it was. At that price point, if you have two reliable co-op partners and a Discord call, Firebreak punches closer to its potential than it ever did at launch. Solo or with randoms you cannot hear, it is a noticeably worse experience. Fred, Scout Team