FBC: Firebreak

It's an amusingly quirky notion, but it wears thin as you empty bullets into pile after pile of stationary stationery

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Often when evaluating shooters we'll talk about ‘gunfeel’ — how satisfying it is to use your weapons for their intended purpose. But what of the targets lined up in their sights? There are certain qualities that tend to make for a good FPS enemy: mobility, a balance of predictable behaviour and capacity for surprise, and (perhaps troublingly) a humanoid, or at least bipedal, shape.

These boxes are all squarely ticked by the Hiss, lifted from the telekinetic thirdperson action of Control and repurposed for a coop FPS in the mould of Left 4 Dead or Vermintide. Firebreak retains some of the more unusual mutations of this threat — such as the Elevated, who bob around in flying office chairs — and adds one of its own, the Breaker, a take on Halo’s brutish Hunter whose back-mounted weak point takes the form of a flopping human corpse. By and large, though, the Hiss are rendered here as a generic zombie horde, recognisable from Control only by that petrol-rainbow smear they leave when shot. They’re meat, essentially, to be fed into your three-person grinder, and an average mission will end with each player’s kill count somewhere in the hundreds. Yet these numbers pale in comparison to the Oldest House’s sticky-note infestation.

Playing Post-it exterminator is an amusingly quirky notion, but it’s a gag that wears thin as you empty bullets into pile after pile of stationary stationery. They fulfil none of the criteria for an interesting FPS target, and yet shooting them accounts for a large proportion of our time in Firebreak. We glance up at the HUD, see there are another 320,647 of the damn things to be destroyed before we can leave, and sigh.