FBC: Fire Protection Review is in Progress
Blog Andrew Joseph 18 Jun , 2025 0
A solid way to judge a co-shooter is how many jokes you and your partner come up with while playing the game. After working in the oldest house for about seven hours, it's safe to say that if this was the only metric to judge the FBC: Firebreak on of On, it would be a simple 10. So far I've come across a sticky behemoth, an evil drummer kit and a possessed traffic light. I also crossed a path through the pink gable and loaded the mannequin into a ski lift. Do I understand why? No, it doesn't matter? not at all. FBC: Firebreak is a first-person shooter that is stupid with your friends with slick combat, eye-catching graphics effects and various goals. The main question I'm still figuring out is: can the remedy maintain this quirky level to keep me interested for a long time?
FBC happened six years after the incident controland invites you to return to the wonderful building of the oldest houses in very different circumstances. You don't save your day as emerging director Jesse Faden, but the first responder of the trio who participated in a weird emergency that would make OSHA officials Wince. When radioactive water ches invade the quarry and need to be thrown into the stove on the wheels of the payload similar to Team Fortress 2, it is you and your team that receive the call. Once you have completed your workplace shift, your team will also have to trek back to the elevator you arrived at and survive until you reach the station. Hey, it's hard work, but someone has to do it.
Despite its cross-two-dimensional rivals of the game, hissing is still forever. So when you try to solve the weird work on hand, you also need to manage a bunch of office workers that you can use. While there is no wide variety of enemy types to solve, at least so far, there is enough diversity to make the gunfire interesting. And, whether it's a shiny ghoul sprint on my glittering ghoul or a flying table jockey zooming in the sky, I'm so happy.
To carry out these expeditions, you can call with the help of two other players, each member of each squad waving a dedicated “crisis kit.” Similar to the class systems in other cooperative shooting games, each suite provides you with a unique skill that speeds up critical tasks throughout your work. For example, on a map called “hot fixation,” players wielding the fixation kit can quickly repair the inside of the broken fan with a quick fix wrench, while the Splash kit crew can support it by preventing heat death with the Earth with its healing ammunition. Meanwhile, the Jump Kit player can activate the generator with an electric charge influencer, jump on the map and control the field using secondary firepower.
It’s worth mentioning that there are no limits to repeat roles, and your staff can triple their size on one skill instead of diversifying the team. You are still able to get the job done, although the approach you need to take will vary greatly depending on the specific composition of the team. While every character’s marksmanship is the same (depending on the load you choose), a blend of similar crisis kits is perfect for tailoring team preference adventures.
But no matter how your team picks powers between characters, the FBC offers a chance to shine for each character, especially when you start upgrading and investing in upgrading trees to unlock PERK-based modifiers and new weapons. When the Resident Repair Kit Operator and Player are most likely to get stuck in a sticky situation, I merged my lost assets (the currency that allows you to upgrade the upgrade tree) into privileges like “Shower Thought”, which allowed me to speed up recovery when using the source of healing as well as “Grey Fingers”, which allowed me to switch between my tools. Although I initially doubted that any significant differences would be made by these additions, I immediately noticed a positive change in my performance, especially during high octane combat encounters.
As of now, the FBC has five unique jobs to choose from and is expected to arrive after release. And, despite the few choices, there is a lot of replayability in the current lineup. My friends paid tribute to the British children's television mascot from the early 90s, calling it Mr. Blobby, which became the bane of our existence – mainly because our clumsy game brought us into the explosives. On the other hand, the perceptual paper registration paper chase task provides the right amount of risks and rewards, and we often revisit the map for more lost assets.
Each workplace in the FBC offers three unique “clearance rates” that expand on basic work, and as these levels advance, the number and intensity of hissing agents and objective standards increase as the map expands. Soon, infected office workers pave the way for winged Eldritch horror and tank beasts, and your team will be forced to communicate to avoid being shot down.
Constant combat has some slow measures, and at each gap level you can find healing purified showers and ammunition bays. Although even safe areas aren't really safe in the FBC, and these life-saving stations can break and shake, requiring a quick fix from a kit or a longer button button session if you're bound to a binding. Trying repairs without proper kits in the FBC results in a rhythmic fast event where you have to click on Q and E (or L1 and R1) in order without making mistakes to make a meter. I didn't expect to encounter a stressful rhythm game in my co-shooter, but I was pleasantly surprised by how it makes the anxiety of completing basic tasks.
But what makes the FBC so ridiculous is the speed at which poor communication abilities can be reversed. In one such mission, I find myself struggling with enemy fire and literal flames while trying to retrieve lost assets. In response to my scream, my Splash Kit teammates heroically rescued my rescue, put out the fire and started resurrecting me…that was, until the second hissing came out and the fire started over again, without warning. As you would expect, my teammates did the same fate as I did when trying to resurrect me. At any time, I can say, “Leave me and save myself.” But, naive, despite the flames and enemies, I think it will be fine. Thankfully, the FBC is not keen to punish you for bad plans, and depending on your difficulty setting, you will have a range of lives that can be spent before the entire game.
FBC is an engaging extension to control the universe and I really enjoyed the time when I exploded in the oldest house with friends. Unfortunately, besides the initial excitement, I was disappointed to find that I was not embedded in the universe related to the remedy as I expected. I guess it's the essence of the replayable co-shooter genre, but the story only appears in the occasional voice lines on the loading screen and on the main menu. It has left me a lot of stories so far, but I still crave more knowledge and hope it will arrive as I go deeper into the difficult modifier.
As of this writing, I've completed the final stages of each work location and am now working with difficulty unlocking rare research samples with corruption-based and threat-based difficulty modifiers, which will allow me to specialize in my own Perk Build. Before I make my final comment, there is still a lot to explore, such as playing alone and upcoming weapon upgrades, such as the “functional” submachine gun I haven't unlocked yet. But now, despite how sparse the story looks in the moment, there is a lot of fun in the strangely remedy bureaucracy. I'll play more this week and end this review right after testing the limitations of Remedy's chaotic collaborative work simulator.