FBC: Firebreak was a bit of a disappointment when it released back in June. There was certainly potential in running around playing janitor within the brutalist interdimensional nexus known as The Oldest House. But Remedy’s cooperative shooter simply didn’t feel ready for action, as I discovered in my FBC: Firebreak review. It was too lean, too repetitive, too unbalanced, and lacked some fundamental features like a proper tutorial.
Remedy has spent the last few months plugging holes in Firebreak’s leaky hull, but the latest patch, which arrives next week, represents the studio’s first proper attempt to turn the ship around. The dramatically named Breakpoint update seems, on paper, to represent a complete overhaul of Firebreak’s core experience, while also adding a whole new mission and a bunch of smaller features, too.
At the heart of Breakpoint is a total rework of how missions are selected. The Jobs board—from which players picked a mission to play and then customised its difficulty and length—has been hacked to splinters with a fire axe and tossed into a skip. It’s replaced by a ‘Crises’ board that offers a tailored selection of Jobs with preset lengths that refresh every 30 minutes, a system that sounds similar to the mission selection screen from Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.
“[The] Firebreak (initiative) was formed to manage an ongoing crisis, and as a first responder, you should be reacting to dynamic, unpredictable dangers, not being asked to create danger for yourself,” Remedy writes to explain the change. The Crises board would also appear to address one of my biggest complaints with Firebreak, namely, how it forced you to play each job in repeated increments. It’s a decision that counter-intuitively reduced its replay value, as it meant you’d already played most of a mission several times over by the point you reached its end, leaving you with little inclination to go back.
Remedy plans to further boost replay value by increasing the unpredictability of jobs, adding alternative objectives that can appear during a mission, and randomising health and ammo locations. Overall, it sounds like a big improvement, though the change does mean players have less control over missions they play, with Remedy saying it is “exploring ways to bring back more customisation in the future”.
This overhaul coincides with the addition of a new Job. Codename ‘Outbreak’ takes a leaf out of Resident Evil 7’s blighted book, with players rushing to contain a rapidly spreading mold epidemic in the oldest house’s research sector. This fungal fiasco introduces two new enemies, stationary Mold Turrets and lumbering Mold Walkers. As well as attacking you, these enemies can also spread the contagion to other characters, potentially turning enemies into Mold Walkers, or your Firebreak coworkers into Mold Turrets. Lovely.
For its final major change, Breakpoint introduces more formal onboarding for new players. Breakpoint adds a playable Orientation level that guides rookie firebreakers through the basics, as well as a ‘Welcome to Firebreak’ video that introduces the overall premise, and overview videos for each Job. I’m glad Remedy has made these latter additions alongside the basic tutorial. Firebreak assumed far too much familiarity with Control when dumping you into The Oldest House, so having proper context for what the FBC is and what you’re doing is not only useful, but given how weird The Oldest House is, also a big part of the fun.
While these are the big new features coming to Breakpoint, there’s a ton of smaller stuff being tweaked and added to. This includes new weapons, three additional Hiss enemies, a gun mod system, an economy rework, and more still.
Remedy states that its ultimate goal with Breakpoint is to “improve everything about the FBC: Firebreak experience” and lay a stronger foundation for future updates, with the next big patch due in November. Longer-term support for Firebreak will likely hinge upon how players respond to these changes. Remedy has already said it is ‘unsatisfied’ with the spinoff’s sales figures and its negligible PC player base, so the onus is on Breakpoint and that November update to bring wayward FBC recruits back into the fold.
