With FBC: Firebreak, Remedy says it’s made a Control shooter ‘for Dads’

Remedy Entertainment’s offices in Espoo, Finland, are buzzing with activity.

The company, just off the back of its biggest critical success ever with Alan Wake 2, is currently in production on four different projects. Control 2, a remake of Max Payne 1 and 2 with Rockstar Games, a secret project headed up by Sam Lake, and its next release, FBC: Firebreak.

FBC: Firebreak is a three-player co-op shooter set in the Control universe. Think Left 4 Dead, or Deep Rock Galactic. “I was playing Powerwash Simulator… and I remember having this thought of ‘what if you were interrupted while you were powerwashing by a zombie, and then you quickly had to get back to it?'” says Mike Kayatta, Firebreak’s game director.

Kayatta, who joined Remedy in 2022 following stints at the mobile giant and fellow Finnish developer Rovio, tells me that he wanted to make a game in which the player flows between meditative and adrenaline-pumping states.

“Deep Rock is actually the most brilliant of any game that does this, where you get really lost in mining the caves and finding ore, and then you’re like ‘Oh my God, bugs!’ and it gets so exciting, then it comes back down.”

A session of FBC: Firebreak begins with the player entering a level of The Oldest House via the elevator, where they are given a task. In one level, it’s destroying post-it notes that have multiplied rapidly due to The Oldest House’s supernatural properties. In another, it’s fixing air vents while white-hot flames shoot across the map.

Each player chooses a role, each with a specific ability. One job lets players fix things quicker, and another shoots water to put out the constant fires raging across the levels. Doing those jobs is the easy part. The difficulty comes in battling the hordes of Hiss that flood every inch of The Oldest House.

The game is a first-person shooter, a genre rather disconnected from the style Remedy’s known for. Ahead of my trip, I was excited for anything new in the Control universe to satiate my hunger for the second game, but whether or not Remedy could pull off the shooting mechanics of an FPS was a question mark. The game doesn’t handle with the tightness of a Call of Duty, it’s lighter, more forgiving, and closer to that of Left 4 Dead.

It feels good without feeling like there’s a massive ceiling to reach in terms of skill level. The challenge comes from the game’s other aspects, like managing your ammo, working together in your team, and staying alive as the game gets more and more punishing.

Each level has multiple stages. For example, the first time through Paper Chase, you’ll clear a few thousand post-its from the level. The second time, you’ll go through a door into a larger area with tougher enemies. By the time you’ve played through the whole level, you’re battling a goliath made of Post-its.

Despite being set in the Control universe, you don’t have to have played Remedy’s third-person action game to know your way around FBC: Firebreak. “That was definitely one of the challenges because we knew that we wanted to make this game accessible for everyone, not require that they played Control before this game,” said lead level designer Teemu Huhtiniemi.

“But as mentioned, The Oldest House is a weird place; it’s like with so much potential, and how do we really introduce you?”

Firebreak is influenced by a lot of contemporary games. Some obvious, and some not so obvious. However, during one of my first matches, I was tasked with doing a minigame that involved mashing the LB and RB buttons. After doing this, I thought to myself, “This reminds me a lot of Overcooked.” Little did I know that just two hours later, several of the game’s developers would tell me that that game was a key point of reference at the beginning of development.

“As inspiration, what we’ve used lately definitely has been Helldivers 2 in many ways,” said lead designer Anssi Hyytiainen. “Left 4 Dead. It’s a great game. So definitely that was there in the beginning. And also, like in the very, very early, early days, we also talked a lot about Overcooked because that’s a game where you need to work collaboratively, but you can have these interesting mishaps that you can bring up later.

“You just screw up in the most critical moment and in the most funny way and then things take a sudden turn and it can make a lot of things very interesting.”

“In the very, very early, early days, we also talked a lot about Overcooked because that’s a game where you need to work collaboratively, but you can have these interesting mishaps that you can bring up later”

Chaotic is a perfect way to describe our experience with Firebreak. Even when things were going well for our group, one mistake and our whole team could be running around, on fire, screaming at each other to try to stay calm and get extinguished.

The real issues started when the two players who were on fire kept running away from the player with the water cannon, leading to the three of us bursting into fits of laughter, then failing the mission. It reminded me of the kind of nonsense that can take place during a GTA Online Heist.

A phrase that kept coming up during my time at Remedy was “dad game”. This is a game that is deep enough to be fun to come back to over and over, but doesn’t require the time investment or dedication that simply isn’t offered to most parents.

“I am a Dad, I have two kids, one of them is a baby, and there’s a lot of time pressure,” said Kayatta. “As people get older, they get a little bit more time poor and cash rich. Everyone has a backlog of like 20 games by the way, not trash, like great games.”

According to Remedy, FBC: Firebreak wants to reward your time, not dominate it. “The game is made by middle-aged dads for middle-aged dads,” says Anssi Hyytiäinen. “That was something that we talked about a lot. We wanted to make the game easy to pick up and throw yourself in there and have fun with your friends.”

Kayatta added: “The session lengths are deliberate; you can literally do five-minute sessions if you want to, if that’s how much time you have.  Even if you’re a completionist, it’s probably like 30, 40 hours, if I remember correctly, but something like not thousands of hours.

“So we’re not like Monster Hunter for sure. And that’s been conscious decision also in that this we don’t want it to be like almost predatory design practices of trying to suck all of your time out of your life.”

One thing that Remedy is keen to instill in me, as I spoke to the team, was that FBC: Firebreak isn’t designed to take over your life. “Somebody mentioned this to me this week, they were saying that they were playing five games that all had battle passes and they loved all five of these games legitimately,” says Kayatta.

“Even when things were going well for our group, one mistake and our whole team could be running around, on fire, screaming at each other to try to stay calm and get extinguished.”

“They looked at these games and realised they couldn’t mathematically complete all of the battle passes in these games, and they told me they had to decide two of the games to basically quit forever to be able to complete the other three battle passes. That’s crazy to me, that’s a sad state, and so for me, that was another big thing about Firebreak was just making sure that you could come to the game on your own terms.”

Kayatta wants to make a game that is fun, rewarding, and feels worth the money, but doesn’t chain players to their console in order to unlock every item, or complete every timed quest.

“We don’t want to try to fight for your minutes and seconds and hours and say, you better come back every day or else. It’s a very abusive relationship, almost. We just wanted to say, look, it’s fun for when you’re ready, and we want to make it as fun as possible. And if you want to give it 100 hours, my gosh, thank you.  If not, you have an hour, two hours, whatever, once a week.

“You want to disappear and wait till another update, come back for a bit, disappear again. That’s actually fine. And we’ve kind of designed around that flexibility so that we can kind of fit into a person’s life instead of ask them to kind of fit into whatever we just decided that life should be.”

FBC: Firebreak is a step in an unexpected direction for one of gaming’s most innovative studios. While hardcore Remedy fans may not be happy with the lack of narrative focus, the game is certainly enjoyable to play, and everything it told me about the game’s progression system is encouraging.

Ultimately, Firebreak will live or die on whether or not players are willing to give it a try, a gamble that many other games in the genre have faced in the past and continue to face. Thankfully, the game will be released in both PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass, which I think is Firebreak’s best shot at really sticking in a market that’s difficult to break into.

Crucially, the gunplay is fun, The Oldest House is an incredible setting for any video game, and Remedy Entertainment‘s trademark weirdness can still be felt, even if it’s not quite as strong.

Remedy is saying all the right things when it comes to respecting player time and attempting to be the antithesis of the trend of games as of service titles turning into a full-time job.

The speed with which it adds new jobs and new playable characters may also determine the success or failure of Firebreak. And while it won’t fill the void of a traditional Remedy single-player game, its fun mechanics and ability to generate multiplayer laughs will be a great way to pass the time before Control 2 is fully revealed.