Control Spin-Off FBC: Firebreak Is A Defiant, Punk-Rock Take On Co-Op Shooters

I was several missions into my hands-on session with FBC: Firebreak when I consciously tried to pinpoint why I was enjoying it so much. The hordes of Hiss overwhelmed me and my group like an exciting round of Left 4 Dead, one of my favorite games ever made; that certainly helped. The objectives were varied, and the outcomes chaotic--the primary healing method is scrambling into a shower big enough to hold your whole team of three, but getting there is often like swimming upstream in a river of monsters. There's, of course, the tried-and-true adage that says most games are better in co-op anyway, so that worked to its advantage, too. But it wasn't until I spoke with Remedy after the session that it became clear how its punk-rock ethos is the glue that holds the project together.

Punk engineering

"One of the terms that we used to describe the aesthetics at some point was 'punk engineering,'" lead level designer Teemu Huhtiniemi told GameSpot. As the game's setup goes, the Oldest House's agents have been locked away inside the liminal maze for six years following the events of Control, which has led to equipment steadily decreasing both in quality and quantity. As a result, agents have resorted to do-it-yourself (DIY) methods to stay armed in the face of the Hiss threat.

Continued Huhtiniemi, "They started building their own tools and modifying their body armor and everything." Thus, despite being a multiplayer spin-off of Control, the game takes on a markedly different style of its own, with bright colors decorating their non-standard-issue welding masks, and spray paints plastering the once-sacred space with irreverent displays of cartoon ducks.

"But we also don't want to drift into what I would call Mad Max land," game director Mike Kayetta told me. "Now, I adore Mad Max. We're just not Mad Max, where people are putting spikes on for no reason other than to look awesome or intimidating. That's not to say there's no sense of self. We start from the perspective of what actually makes sense in the world, and then we say, 'How can we pull that into a [more expressive] place that still feels grounded?' It's pretty obvious that things feel different tonally, and that's a necessity, and fits better with [Firebreak's] genre. But we've never wanted to exit the Control space entirely, so we want to keep that edge."

This punk spirit is expressed not just in their fashion, but also in their function, best seen in the game's class-based system that divides players into Crisis Kits. Though you can double- or triple-up on Crisis Kits in a full team of three, it's best played with one person taking on each role: the Jump Kit, Fix Kit, and Splash Kit. Each kit includes a lengthy chain of unlockables, such as passive traits that make ammo gathering faster or fortify defenses, as well as a primary set of skills and tools they bring into any mission, or "Job."

The Jump Kit enjoys an electrifying weapon that zaps Hiss at short range, launches the player high off the ground, and repairs generators. There's also a boombox that can be unlocked, which attracts all nearby Hiss into one spot and allows players to either find some breathing room or take them all out together.

The Fix Kit is the melee expert of the group and doubles as the repair technician for any Job's broken-down machinery, like healing showers. Through persistent leveling, players can eventually attach a piggy bank to their wrench, shattering on contact, then re-forming over time and further damaging the Hiss it hits on the way back to taking shape, like a more scattershot version of the axe from God of War. This class also includes a turret that will fire until it's destroyed.

The Splash Kit is the most visually interesting of the trio, equipped with a weapon that shoots water bubbles that get bigger and heavier the longer you hold down the fire trigger. Unlockables include a "Teapot" alternate firing mode that turns the weapon into a flamethrower and a "Humidifier" that does area-of-effect healing, which saved my team's butts a number of times when showers were few and far between.

Essentially, each kit is decked out by way of the agents combining the Oldest House's paranatural Altered Items with a bit of duct tape and improvisation. Playing with each class, I could really see and feel the makeshift nature of the tools at my disposal, and I loved how it tied itself to Control's iconic setting by turning its dangerous artifacts into, essentially, weapon mods and deployable items on the battlefield.

This trio also combines to give the game an unexpected elemental approach to combat, where you can have the Splasher hosing down Hiss enemies, the Jumper shocking them to the point where they're taking damage over time, and the Fixer vacillating between completing objectives and cracking skulls. I knew that the game might play a bit like Left 4 Dead based on what I'd seen so far in trailers, but it's the makeshift elemental weapons that feel appreciably additive to that style of game.

You end up relying on your teammates to be where you need them to be when you need them to be there, which feels so satisfying when everything is clicking. Each of these special class-based weapons is aided by a customizable loadout that also includes things like grenades and more typical guns such as SMGs, shotguns, and pistols, and given how swarming the Hiss can be, you'll routinely exhaust everything you've got on you to overcome the monsters.

Take control

Just as its heroes express punkish fashion and function, the game is designed with the same disregard for norms. The punk ethos is about questioning the status quo, and this shines through in FBC: Firebreak's disregard for typical live-service elements. Though it's a co-op game with free content updates that will follow its launch this summer, Firebreak has no intentions of putting a time limit on anything. It's built with Remedy's anti-FOMO intentions from top to bottom. Classified Requisitions packs will offer paid cosmetics that "come out at special times and feel special when they are released," Kayetta said, but added that "they will just be permanent fixtures at that point, so you'll always be able to access them. You should never feel like, 'Oh, wow. I wasn't in this game a year ago, and therefore I have a quote, unquote less valuable collection than other people.'"

Remedy also intentionally rejected systems like daily and weekly challenges, which Kayetta feels can push people away from some games, even as those systems are designed to keep them perpetually invested. "The FOMO thing is even deeper than just a battle pass," he told me. "[A game is] presenting you with the idea that the value of this game is this big," he said, gesturing to the size, "and if you only have time to do so much, you literally have a fear of missing out on tons of the value that you think you're owed. Because the game has told you this is the value space. So for [the Firebreak team], it's also about controlling the value space." When a game gives off the feeling of being so enormous in its scope, "some players say, 'I either am going to step all the way in, which is an additional investment, or I'm gonna go find something else.'"

Kayetta was touching on a topic I've written about previously. I've dropped games I enjoy from my personal time because I felt like I wasn't getting all I was "supposed to" out of them. It's something that still happens to this day. Many games, especially multiplayer games, often leave me feeling like I should be playing more to extract their maximum value. If it's all or nothing, and I'm too busy to get all of it, I opt to get nothing. This likely reads as either silly or relatable, depending on who you are. FBC: Firebreak is thankfully built not to elicit those feelings, which is a defiant move in the genre today, and which Kayetta said is only possible because the game is self-published.

"We're a publicly traded company, and we have our players, so it's not like we're not accountable to anybody," he said. "Obviously, we're accountable. But at the end of the day, Remedy self-publishing [FBC: Firebreak] has put us in the position where we can make these decisions. [We decide] what makes the most sense with this game, which is to make sure that players get value out of it, and that's it, and that's enough. I'm not talking about any games in particular, but, a lot of failed efforts that people unfairly compare games that haven't come out to yet are often trying to fulfill a mandate to say, 'The only way to be successful is to compete for that screen space against something like Fortnite'--which, what an outrageous mandate to deliver a team anyway."

It was clear that Kayetta and I had both thought a lot about this modern dilemma, so I asked him if it's scary to eschew so much of what everyone else in the multiplayer space tends to be doing right now. "It's not scary to me in the least. I have a baby. I have a five-year-old. I have a backlog that's 10,000 miles long. I want to be able to put something down for six months and come back to it. There are those days where I'm like, 'Oh man, I remember having so much fun [with a game], and I want to go back,' and then I open it and I'm like, 'What has happened here?' Like, this guy's wearing this birthday hat, and there are 18 modes, and there are 70 patch notes. It's terrifying to me, and I'm just like, 'You know what? I only have an hour to play right now. I'm not spending 30 minutes of that hour reading about all of the stuff that I haven't seen in months.'" He added that if players do come back each day, week, month, and so on, it should be because they want to be there, not because they feel like they're there to check a box. "Of course," he added, "if you're having a blast, you wanna stay there every day? Awesome."

The Oldest House party

It was fascinating to me not just that Remedy is making its first multiplayer game, but that it's mapped the multiplayer landscape in such detail so that it can do things how it wants to, not necessarily how it's learned to by playing and studying other co-op games. If that means bucking trends, so be it. "Sometimes you can kind of lift a feature [from a different game] and it can slot in, and that absolutely happens, and that's fantastic, but ultimately, things are greater than the sum of their parts," Kayetta said when I asked about how the team studied games similar to Firebreak.

"We started before Helldivers 2 came out," he continued, "and once it did, we were looking for places to say, 'What's working for them, what's not working for them?' We do analysis playthroughs of things and say, 'What do we like? What do we not like?' We watch for player reactions, especially in live games. The key thing for us, though, is to know that what works for somebody else may or may not work for us. It's not always a direct translation [that says] 'This feature is bad or good.' That's never the case. It's good or bad inside the context of the other features that it's touching, especially in a systemic game."Making a multiplayer game with post-launch plans in 2025 doesn't have to mean building out FOMO systems, Remedy believes, but Kayetta does agree with popular opinion in at least one sense: The community of players has more input than ever before. Navigating that can be difficult for any team, as you don't want to hand over all the power to your players, but neither do you necessarily want to ignore them and stubbornly press on with an idea that isn't being received well. Kayetta offered an interesting perspective on this relationship: "Developers are really bad at seeing problems and really good at fixing problems, and players are really good at seeing problems and really bad at fixing problems.

"The community talks to you in two ways: with their words and with their actions. So the first one is, what are people talking about on Reddit? What are they telling us? What are they telling us in Steam ratings and things like this? And then there's also like, what are all of the people who aren't either so happy or so angry that they commented online doing? Then, that's where we start gathering heat maps, and [seeing] where people were actually going and how they are progressing through the economy. Because you don't want to leave that stuff to just the anecdotal."

Kayetta said the team's plan in shaping the game with the community is twofold. One is adding "big, interesting, super impactful content" like the two more Jobs coming to the game in 2025, alongside features "we haven't talked about yet that are in development, which I'm super excited about." The other is considering feedback and letting player input drive some considerations. Remedy has been cautious not to nail down a specific number of Jobs (beyond the five at launch and two more in 2025), Kayetta said, because "some games are not made more interesting because you just keep adding, adding, adding, and adding things like levels. You could add 70 more campaigns [to Left 4 Dead]. I'm not sure if that makes Left 4 Dead better. So, what are people really looking for? And we understand that we don't exactly know that yet, and so we do want to hear it."

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FBC: Firebreak arrives on June 17 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5. It will also debut in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PlayStation Plus Premium. PC specs have not yet been revealed, but Remedy said it's targeting less-demanding specs than its past games, while still offering a host of visual effects like those seen in Control and Alan Wake 2. For more on my time with the multiplayer game, learn how FBC: Firebreak fits into the Remedy Connected Universe, and read about the unexpected game that influenced FBC: Firebreak.