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CNET
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
FBC: Firebreak: 9 Beginner Tips to Survive Your First Shift
So you've volunteered to be a Firebreaker, and now you're staring down a paranatural threat with only a glorified super soaker in your hands. It happens to the best of us. FBC: Firebreak is developer Remedy Entertainment's first crack at a live-service multiplayer game. It's a Left 4 Dead-like horde shooter set in the Oldest House (from Control), an ever-shifting building that contains the world's foremost paranatural threats. Taking place six years after Remedy's 2019 game Control, FBC: Firebreak has players participating in a new initiative that seeks to contain the Hiss invaders and other crises throughout the Oldest House's sectors by drafting a ragtag team of volunteers from within the Bureau. The game is heavy on action, and you'll have to utilize teamwork, your first-person shooting skills and all of the pieces of your arsenal to survive. Here are some tips to survive your first shift. Get the squad together for the best odds at surviving the Oldest House. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET FBC: Firebreak has crossplay -- so bring any friend you can Firebreak has full crossplay between PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, which means you can venture into the heart of the Oldest House with any of your friends. This is a game where camaraderie and team play will win the day, so you'll want to play with folks who you know will have your back. It's also just nice to be able to communicate with your teammates over Discord. Note that even though Firebreak has crossplay, it doesn't have cross-progression. That means you can bring the whole gang together to play, but your level-ups, perks and kit unlocks will be locked to whatever platform you're playing on. When a teammate is downed, it's even more important to work together to revive your ally. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Communication is important, even without voice chat One of Firebreak's more bizarre design decisions is the fact that a horde shooter has no in-game chat options. You can't hook up a microphone to communicate with your teammates, and there's no text chat option to send them a quick message. That makes queuing with randoms extremely difficult -- this is a game that requires teammates to stick closely together to receive shield and perk benefits from one another, and anyone who splits off can be quickly overwhelmed by paranatural threats. This is even mechanically enforced -- if you stray far from your squad, soon your shields will deplete. You should frequently mark waves of enemies your teammates haven't noticed yet, ping where you're moving to keep the team together and point out shelters before you open them and spawn a wave of Hiss enemies. Even if you're in a good place resource-wise, ping the healing showers and sinks and any ammunition you don't need. Live and die by the ping system, because it's the only way you'll be able to share crucial information with the team. The tea kettle altered item can give the Splash Kit some real firepower (literally), but it's not available often enough to be viable for solo matches. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET The Splash Kit is the worst solo kit, but it's the best multiplayer kit The game's three classes (or Kits) all bring a substantial amount of utility to Firebreak's Jobs. The Jump Kit quickly restarts electronics, and the Fix Kit hammers away at the showers, ammo stations and the lights to get crucial interactables working again more quickly than a manual repair. The Splash Kit starts off with a glorified Super Soaker that makes enemies wet and staggers them upon charged-up hits, but doesn't really feature any other utility out of the box. In solo play, you'll barely have time to pull out your gun before the horde you just knocked backwards gets up and starts to maul you again. Multiplayer matches are where the Splash Kit really sings. When massive mobs of enemies descend on the team, the person carrying this kit keeps many of the Hiss fighters permanently knocked down by firing globs of water at them. This lets the rest of the team clean up the fight quickly, efficiently and without much risk. It can even wash off fire and other annoying hazards, too. If your teammates bring other weapons to cover your weaknesses, the revolver is even better. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Bring along a six-shooter at the beginning of the game Firebreak's arsenal of weapons is extremely limited, and all of the guns hit like a wet noodle until you upgrade them. You start with a boomstick that doesn't boom, a submachine gun that requires you to burn ammo to tick away an enemy's health bar and a revolver that can knock out fodder in two shots (or one well-placed shot to the dome). The revolver is the obvious choice for new players until you have enough lost assets to buff your weapons up by advancing in the requisition pass (which functions like a Helldivers 2 war bond). It hits the hardest, it has a modest reload time compared with the shotgun and its only downside is offset by the fact you have two teammates covering you as well. The Jump Kit and Splash Kit combo exceptionally well together for taking out massive hordes of Hiss enemies. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET When the horde bears down upon you, combine your kit powers When the Hiss enemies threaten to overwhelm your Firebreaker squad, stow your guns and pull out your class abilities. A Fix Kit user might have a rough go of things in the early game -- the wrench doesn't connect with a satisfying kinetic impact and does very little damage or knockback until it gets upgrades. But the Splash Kit and Jump Kit have fundamentally strong synergy that cuts a swath through waves of foes. Your Splash Kit user should be hosing down a horde, while the Jump Kit user follows up with devastating shocks. The strategy isn't super consistent, but electricity should chain through most of the wet Hiss, and you can take out dozens of fodder enemies at once. The best part is that this pairing can be repeated whenever you want. You can use the water gun or the electric jumper as often as you like, so employ this combo liberally when the going gets tough. If there's no ammo station around, pop open a nearby shelter and loot your weaponry there instead. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Resource management is the key to victory in harder Jobs Once you unlock more parts of your Firebreaker kit, you'll want to step into harder Jobs, either by upping the difficulty or the containment level for longer expeditions. That's the right move, but you'll have to learn a new skill: Resource management. It's very easy to stay stocked up on ammunition on lower difficulty missions, but it starts to get harder to retain your resources as hordes of enemies constantly spawn in as you set the threat level higher. Make sure you know where the closest ammo station is at all times, and don't be afraid to pop open one of the bunker-like shelters to collect the ammunition (and more importantly, the grenades) from within. Certain enemies, like the armored grenadiers with miniguns, will also drop several ammo pickups when you defeat them. Players are able to restock their most important equipment as well, like the Fix Kit's swivel gun or the Splash Kit's healing humidifier, but this takes longer and you can't count on being able to pull another one of these valuable abilities out of the ammo station in a pinch (its replenishment seems erratic). Prepare your arsenal between encounters so you have these powerful pieces of equipment when you need them the most. Stock up on the loot when the boss drops lost assets. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Stock up on lost assets wherever you can find them If you see a dossier, grab a dossier. These folders -- known as lost assets -- are the primary currency in FBC: Firebreak, and you'll need them to purchase items on the requisition pass and unlock perks. Lost assets can be found sparsely scattered around levels, but you're guaranteed to find a heap of them if you crack open a shelter and take a peek inside. Mini boss enemies (the ones that spawn with unique names and a health bar at the top of your screen) also drop a handful of lost assets for you to pick up. Not every asset gives you the same amount of requisition points. The fatter closed folders will give you more points to spend after you extract them. There's no limit to how many assets you can recover, though, so pick them all up at your leisure. It's important to know that if you go down and a teammate can't revive you, all of the lost assets you were carrying will scatter around the spot where you were defeated. Once you respawn, work with your teammates to fight back to that location -- or else you'll lose all of the lost assets you were previously toting around. The Black Rock Neutralizer is the only weapon capable of taking out altered items that are making your game harder. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET The Black Rock Neutralizer is your new best friend The ragtag Firebreak initiative team doesn't exactly have a stellar arsenal. You're carrying around a single (probably faulty) firearm, a jury-rigged gadget and a couple of other odds and ends. It'll certainly be a challenge to hold your own against the paranatural threats of the Oldest House, but every once in a while, you may come across a great equalizer. The Black Rock Neutralizer is a special weapon you can find at ammo stations or (rarely) within opened bunkers. This grinder propels chunks of black rock ore at enemies, ripping them apart with ease. It's an incredibly effective weapon that thins out hordes or shreds through boss health bars. Most importantly, if you're playing with corruption modifiers on, the Black Rock Neutralizer is the only way to destroy the altered items that cause chaos throughout the match. No matter what you use this weapon for, it's an incredibly versatile piece of equipment that can help your team stay in control of the battlefield. Making a stand with your back against the wall is a good way to make sure you funnel the swarm in from one direction. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET When in doubt, huddle it out This is a team game, and you and your teammates are forced to stick together if you want to fight at full power. Players in close proximity to one another get resonance bonuses, sharing the benefit of any leveled-up perks that they have equipped. More importantly, players who are split up from one another don't get the benefits of shield regeneration, which means they're basically kneecapping their own survivability. When a situation gets out of hand, sometimes the best thing a team can do is huddle up in an area with health and ammo until they can get things back under control. Whether you park yourself in the start of a zone with an ammo station and a shower, or you find a nice warm bunker to open up, identify the best places to make a combined stand.
CNET
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
FBC: Firebreak: 6 Fun Nods to Control
FBC: Firebreak is studio Remedy Entertainment's first multiplayer romp. As a Left 4 Dead-esque objective-based horde shooter taking place in the Oldest House (the headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control), the game is heavy on action and light on story. That doesn't mean that the game is completely divorced from the shared Remedyverse that bridges the events of Control and the Alan Wake series. Firebreak takes place six years after the events of Control, and dimension-hopping Hiss invaders are still causing havoc throughout the building. There are many references and bits of dialogue that hint toward the events that transpired in Control, but you might miss them as you hose down the Hiss, stomp out sticky notes, pick up radioactive pearls and do more of the jobs no one else wants to volunteer for. As a matter of fact, the entire Firebreak initiative is named after the black rock-lined bridges that disconnected entire sectors of the Oldest House from one another when the Hiss initially invaded the FBC. Readers beware -- if you haven't yet beaten Control, this article will contain spoilers for events throughout the game. Here are the most interesting nods to Remedy's take on the X-Files/SCP Foundation genre of government agencies taking on the supernatural. This ragtag team of volunteers better hope and pray their HRAs don't get knocked off during the more frenetic fights. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Every player is carrying a Hedron Resonance Amplifier No matter what cosmetic skin you apply to your Firebreaker, you'll notice there's a little black box strapped to your suit somewhere or another. Those are Hedron Resonance Amplifiers, and it's a good thing you're carrying them around. If you lost that piece of your kit, you wouldn't be yourself for much longer. These devices prevent the Hiss from taking over the human body by pumping out a different frequency from a more benevolent resonance-based organism: Polaris, Jesse Faden's symbiotic mental passenger, who accompanies you during the events of Control. Lots of care was put into differentiating the character cosmetics in Firebreak. The ragtag team of volunteers isn't armed to the teeth, but they've devised different ways to armor themselves against gunfire, flames or other field hazards. The single constant is the HRA, because no one would survive a mission without it. It's a nice bit of attention to detail -- keep a keen eye on your character model as you try out different cosmetics, because you'll always be able to spot Dr. Casper Darling's protective device. There's a fun narrative reason that the Black Rock Neutralizer will be an integral map pick up for your team. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET The Black Rock Neutralizer is the only way to handle paranatural threats Those Hedron Resonance Amplifiers didn't spawn out of thin air. The FBC's head of research, Dr. Casper Darling, needed to find a way to stabilize the anti-Hiss resonance. The Oldest House contains its own paranatural quarry containing black rock, a rare ore that can destroy or contain other powerful, unexplained phenomena. Black rock was used in the construction of the HRAs, and the FBC frequently boxes in altered items and dimensional thresholds with this material to ensure they can't spread throughout the agency's headquarters. In FBC: Firebreak, players will find special weapons called Black Rock Neutralizers that use chunks of black rock ore as ammunition. The ore is fed through a grinder, fragmenting it at high velocity toward enemies. (It's very similar to the skull-spewing guns from Doom: The Dark Ages.) During Jobs with a corruption variable, players may run into paranatural threats that make their lives harder. The Black Rock Neutralizer is the only way to eliminate these level-modifying altered items. The existence of this weapon is a testament to how inventive the Firebreakers are, creating an effective arsenal with the resources they have on hand. The Federal Bureau of Control planned ahead for paranatural emergencies -- and these bunkers were the result. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET The safe areas scattered about are what saved the FBC during the Hiss outbreak You'll feel an overwhelming sense of relief when you find the bunkers scattered throughout FBC: Firebreak's levels. Sure, opening them up will flood the zone with a wave of Hiss enemies, but after you deal with that pesky inconvenience, you'll have access to a new safe area filled to the brim with ammo drops, grenades, lost asset folders and a functioning sink for emergency healing. If you need to respawn, you'll come back from the closest shelter you've opened, which is far nearer than the elevator. If you're lucky, you'll even find a Black Rock Neutralizer to tear through the next bunch of baddies that come your way. These bunkers will be familiar to anyone who has played Control, because they were the last bastions of safety for some of the most important FBC agents once the Hiss invaded the Oldest House. Emily Pope, a research specialist and one of Jesse Faden's staunchest allies, was trapped in one of these bunkers in the Executive Sector until the Hiss presence was brought down to a more manageable level. These shelters also contained mods that buffed up Jesse Faden. In every game they appear, these bunkers are kind of just well-armored treasure chests, so crack them open and get to looting. The victims of the Bureau Book Club faced suspiciously similar fates to the fictional characters they read about. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET The reformation of the Bureau Book Bunch Control contains tons of collectibles that tell side stories that flesh out the day-to-day lifestyle of FBC agents. We got an idea of what the average work-life balance looks like for these folks as they balanced their time between fantastical paranatural jobs and the banalities of office paperwork. One of the most interesting sets of written correspondence players could run across was the notes from the FBC's Bureau Book Bunch. This quartet of agents would routinely meet in the Oldest House's cafeteria to discuss novels together, though the novel itself seemed to have paranatural properties, as each FBC agent involved in the book club would write a different synopsis of events contained therein. The Bureau Book Bunch fell apart during the Hiss invasion, with at least two of the members falling victim to the resonance-based hivemind. Though the Oldest House is still in a state of crisis by the time the Firebreak initiative is put together, it seems as though some FBC agents are trying to retain a sense of normalcy. During one dialogue exchange before players embark on a Job, the leader of Firebreak, Hank Flowers, is invited to a new iteration of the book club being put together by an agent named Francine. He quickly turns down the offer, but that doesn't mean the Bureau Book Bunch won't be riding again by the time a full sequel to Control comes along. Your parautility will give you a much-needed burst of firepower when the going gets tough in the Oldest House. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Your ultimate ability is a paranatural force in and of itself The Firebreakers are pretty expendable foot soldiers in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't mean Hank is sending them out there intending for them to bite the dust. This volunteer force is made up of amateur parautilitarians (individuals who have bound and use paranatural items). Each Firebreaker carries a single altered item -- the garden gnome, piggy bank or tea kettle, depending on which kit you choose -- so they don't have the luxury of mix-and-matching powerful items like Jesse Faden does. Still, it's likely that these altered items (and the altered items that get in your way during corrupted levels) were released from the Panopticon area featured during the back half of Control. The Panopticon housed some of the most dangerous paranatural items and entities that the FBC has come across, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Now these powerful items are crisis management tools for the Firebreak initiative. Jesse Faden better be involved in a case well above my paygrade if she's not showing up to lend us a hand. Remedy Entertainment/Screenshot by CNET Director Faden doesn't have time for the Firebreakers Control protagonist Jesse Faden is one of the most powerful parautilitarians known to the FBC. After the death of director Zachariah Trench, she becomes the next wielder of the Service Weapon and subsequently takes his place as the acting director of the agency. Director Faden struck the first real blows against the Hiss invaders and other paranatural organisms in the Oldest House by binding herself to nearly a dozen altered items. She's absurdly strong, which would make her a great asset against the sticky notes, pink goop and other threats that players encounter in Firebreak. However, the most you'll hear about Director Faden is a couple of lines of dialogue explaining that she's busy dealing with more important issues. Hank grumbles that her presence would probably be good for the team's morale. When I'm armed with only a revolver and a glorified Super Soaker, I can't say I'd disagree. The Hiss have been running amok around the Oldest House for six years now, and things seem to be getting a little, y'know, out of control. Jesse Faden better be palling around with Alan Wake on a quest to save the world or something if she's not helping the CNET crew deal with the Hiss in Paper Chase.
Digital Trends
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
How to join the FBC: Firebreak closed beta test
We're just weeks away from the release of Remedy's upcoming video game set in the Control universe, FBC: Firebreak. Unlike Control or Alan Wake 2, FBC: Firebreak isn't a single player third-person shooter but a co-op focused multiplayer game. The trailers how off a distinctly Remedy-style game, with strange events and monsters around every corner, but if you were drawn to the studio's past games for being single-player experiences, you might be unsure about this one. Thankfully, you have the chance to dive into the Oldest House early by signing up for the closed technical test. Here's our memo on how to do it. Recommended Videos Difficulty Easy Duration 5 minutes What You Need Email address How to join the FBC: Firebreak closed technical test Remedy is hosting a short closed technical test to make sure the game is stable and ready to go when it launches on June 17. The test will begin on May 15 at 6 AM P.T and conclude on May 19 at 2 pm P.T. Since this is a closed test, not everyone will make it in, so let's get you signed up for a chance to play ASAP. Step 1: Head over to the official FBC: Firebreak test signup page. Step 2: Scroll to the bottom and enter your email address. Step 3: After completing the capcha, you will get a verification code sent to that email you will need to enter. Step 4: Agree to the terms and conditions and hit Sign Up., That's it! You're now in the lottery to get into the FBC: Firebreak closed technical test. Those who are selected will get an email informing them they got in and further instructions on how to access the test. Remedy did not specify how many people will be chosen for this test, nor when emails will be sent out, so all you can do at this point is cross your fingers and hope you get it.
