Although it takes place in the identical setting as Management, it couldn’t be any clearer in Treatment’s new co-op shooter that you’re no Jesse Faden.
Neglect telekinetic superpowers and shape-shifting weaponry—this time you are simply an expendable grunt, despatched out to do jobs so harmful that your goals usually tend to kill you than the hordes of Hiss-possessed ghouls.
Throughout my two-and-a-half-hour hands-on with FBC: Firebreak, I really by no means knew what to anticipate as I jumped into every new mission—although “one thing disagreeable” was a superb rule of thumb. One minute I used to be transporting lethal radioactive materials in a nightmarish quarry filled with big leeches, the following I used to be desperately dodging via an workplace attempting to keep away from being engulfed by parasitic post-it notes.
They construct these gadgets, or they’re utilizing a paranatural object, that’s in all probability a bit of bit too highly effective for their very own good.
Anssi Hyytiainen, Lead Designer
Even mid-mission I usually discovered myself blind-sided by some new deadly wrinkle within the plan. An tour to restore malfunctioning furnace followers that maintain intermittently spewing flame already felt dangerous sufficient—my staff and I could not fairly consider it when our goal marker indicated the following step was to complete the repairs by crawling inside them and hammering away whereas actually on hearth.
“Undoubtedly a giant reference recreation can be the best way that pleasant hearth, for instance, works in Helldivers 2,” says lead designer Anssi Hyytiainen. Definitely the travails of our staff do evoke a few of Helldivers’ slapstick comedy and satire. We’re redshirts, not heroes, messing with forces past our management. “They construct these gadgets, or they’re utilizing a paranatural object, that’s in all probability a bit of bit too highly effective for their very own good.”
Again to work
However you are not simply there to die and giggle at one another’s misfortune—you have bought a job to do. The lethality of the goals forces inventive teamwork, utilizing the sport’s suite of unusual instruments and methods.
As an alternative of lessons, every participant is outlined by their “package”. The repair package means that you can be a kind of close-range engineer, whereas the splash package makes you a water-spraying assist, and the soar package helps you to each soar (as much as excessive locations) and soar (-start electrical gadgets). Every has its personal fight purposes, however in a way harking back to Deep Rock Galactic, they arrive alive in how they mix to resolve sensible issues.
Whereas I am bashing away with my wrench in a quickly overheating fan tunnel, my buddy could be spraying me down with water to maintain the flames at bay.
Whereas I am bashing away with my wrench in a quickly overheating fan tunnel, my buddy could be spraying me down with water to maintain the flames at bay. Subsequent mission, he is soaking piles of dwelling post-its as a substitute, prepared for our jump-kitter to zap them with a cost of electrical energy, whereas I arrange a sentry gun to cowl our imminent extraction.
Determining your plan and placing it in movement is made extra tense and tough by hordes of Hiss continuously bearing down on you. Whenever you’re not frantically hauling one thing harmful or attempting to repair one thing in a panic, you are in all probability firing a shotgun or an SMG into the lots. Although with a reasonably normal choice of weapons exterior of your package, and gunplay that is sturdy however not essentially thrilling, the waves of enemies do not feel like the principle focus, regardless of their usually overwhelming numbers.
They do demand some tactical considering—dashing into the mob to take out a key goal, or distracting a bigger foe so an ally can loop spherical to hit the weak spot in its again. However regardless of their inventive visuals (they’re principally ported over immediately from Management’s bizarre menagerie of possessed workplace staff and safety employees, however look much more putting bearing down on you in first-person), they largely quantity to a well-recognized zombie horde.
That makes them extra an environmental stress than an organised foe. They’re there to push you to dash for that subsequent ammo station, velocity up your repairs on the decontamination bathe, make a break for the extraction level, or get fast and sloppy with a harmful goal.
And the identical systemic interactions used to beat the obstacles in your path could be thrown their method too. Whacking them with my wrench definitely bought rather a lot simpler as soon as they’d been drenched in water after which shocked first, whereas hearth proves a double-edged sword towards them. Warmth from close by fires speeds them up, making them extra harmful, but when they get too sizzling, they’re going to combust and perish identical to your staff.
Every package means that you can push that additional with an increase—primarily an final skill you could deploy to ramp up the chaos to much more agreeable ranges. From firing globules of scalding sizzling tea, to deploying a lightning storm gnome, to strapping an explosive piggybank to your melee weapon, they are a enjoyable injection of distinctly Treatment strangeness into the motion.
Total, although I’ve loved my time with the sport up to now, I am undecided there’s as a lot depth right here as I would like. Fight does the job, however there would not appear to be as a lot to familiarize yourself with or uncover right here as there’s in genre-mates like Darktide or the aforementioned Helldivers 2.
And with solely three kits and comparatively restricted customisability, it does really feel like a couple of too most of the goals and environmental obstacles that make up the meat of the expertise could be resolved with pretty comparable ‘water + hearth/electrical energy’ options—it isn’t as different a check of your inventive considering as Deep Rock Galactic, even when the conditions are sometimes stranger.
However it does all mix to create that pretty feeling that you just’re really working collectively to realize one thing, somewhat than merely carving via waves of foes, with loads of visible novelty to every process. And such systems-driven motion is definitely a captivating departure for a studio identified extra for meticulously-crafted storytelling, scripted sequences, and elaborate musical numbers.
Altered world
“PvE type of screams ‘this must be extra of a playground kind of expertise’,” says Hyytiainen.
“We wish this recreation to be one thing you could play a number of occasions,” provides lead stage designer Teemu Huhtiniemi. “The entire concept is you could simply soar in and have enjoyable. And naturally, once you’re making an expertise like that, it is advisable to make it possible for it is enjoyable to play like, 100 occasions, and also you at all times get one thing a bit of bit completely different.
“I believe lots of the attraction of the undertaking, in-house, additionally comes from the truth that it’s so completely different from what we have performed earlier than … it was an attention-grabbing problem to see, okay, how can we do that?”
It is a change of scene for Treatment in additional than simply the shift in style. Although the event staff contains long-standing veterans (Hyytiainen, for instance, has been on the studio for 25 years) it is a small undertaking in comparison with the principle staff engaged on Management 2, and for the primary time in Treatment’s historical past, it is fully self-published.
That makes it an attention-grabbing experiment. Now that the studio has established a related universe for its video games, can it develop it additional with smaller spin-offs, somewhat than solely with massive, costly mainline entries? And might that setting assist video games exterior of the singleplayer third-person motion style?
As an enormous fan of Treatment, I would like to see this open up new potentialities for the studio—and I definitely assume there’s sufficient of the inventive design and distinctive ambiance of Management in FBC: Firebreak, regardless of the dearth of extra conventional storytelling.
Workplace politics
What my time with the sport would not reveal is the place within the crowded co-op area this recreation actually suits, nonetheless. Although it has loads of problem—with a number of other ways of tweaking the sport’s problem and the way lengthy and intense you need your session to be—it is by design an off-the-cuff strategy to on-line multiplayer, not demanding the funding of time of a full stay service recreation.
There’s positively an attraction to a co-op recreation in 2025 that does not ask you to swear your life to it, however I do fear that strategy will make FBC: Firebreak simple to go on. The identical quirky ideas that make it intriguing additionally make it pretty area of interest, and possibly most interesting to Treatment’s core viewers, who aren’t essentially searching for a multiplayer expertise. Mix that with what appears to be a reasonably modest providing of content material and comparatively restricted strategic depth, and never solely does discovering an viewers appear removed from assured, I query how lengthy the gamers it does attain are going to stay round.
It simply opens up a world of potentialities, creatively, for what we might do.
Teemu Huhtiniemi, Lead Stage Designer
However maybe that is worrying over-much in regards to the studio’s backside line. What ought to in all probability matter extra to you, if you’re a Treatment fan, is that this does really feel like a worthy extension of this unusual and engaging world that is been unfurling in Management and Alan Wake 2. There is probably not FMV cutscenes, audilogs, or a whole Finnish horror film hidden wherever in FBC: Firebreak, however what it does provide is a completely new perspective on considered one of gaming’s most unusual settings.
“We have been fascinated with the Oldest Home and the way bizarre it’s, and the idea of experiencing it via the eyes of a standard particular person,” says Huhtiniemi. “Somebody who would not have the superpowers, and somebody who wants to beat unimaginable odds. That felt actually thrilling as a thought already … having that perspective alone, it simply opens up a world of potentialities, creatively, for what we might do.”
To Jesse Faden, the Oldest Home is a playground for telekinetic motion. For the “volunteers” of FBC: Firebreak, it is a huge and hostile jail to outfight and outthink collectively—earlier than you by chance fall into an enormous furnace, die of radiation illness, or get changed into a post-it observe zombie, and the following man in line steps as much as take your home.
You can step into that meatgrinder your self when the sport launches on June 17 later this yr.