UNCONTROLLED

FBC: FIREBREAK is a big old mess. Mainly by design, but partly by mistake

- Rick Lane

FBC: Firebreak is one of the messiest games I've ever played, but this is in large part because it is a game about mess. Creating it, cleaning it up, getting caked up to your neck in it - your character is constantly covered in water or sticky notes or quivering pink goo that could've sluiced straight out of a British gameshow in the '90s. If Noel Edmonds ever made a first-person shooter, it would probably look like Firebreak.

But Firebreak is also deliberately messy on a mechanical level. It's all about figuring out how things work through trial and (often fatal) error, a game of bungling your way through crowds of enemies hoping you don't accidentally fry or torch or explode your friends in the process.

For those unaware, FBC: Firebreak is a cooperative spinoff of Remedy's excellent 2019 action game Control. It's still set in The Oldest House, a foreboding, brutalist interdimensional nexus that serves as the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control - essentially the FBI for weird shit.

Instead of playing as the director of the FBC, empowered with anomalous magic in slick third-person combat, you play as the FBC's Firebreakers, disposable janitors clad in rubber suits and acoustic foam panel armour tasked with fixing The Oldest House's reality-defying maintenance issues. Between you and your objective stands an army of the FBC's own employees, possessed and contorted by a force called the Hiss. Firebreak doesn't really explain any of this. It assumes you're familiar with Control and doesn't have much in the way of a tutorial, cramming a hasty explanation into a loading-screen letter which in the age of SSDs you won't have time to read. If you're coming to Firebreak without having played Control (like my poor, long-suffering partner) prepare to be tremendously confused.