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Since the release of Max Payne in 2001, Remedy has been known for delivering highly-polished single player experiences. Their last two games, Control and Alan Wake II, were picked by Bloody Disgusting as the best games of their respective years. All this made it very surprising when they announced FBC: Firebreak, a co-op first person shooter set in the world of Control.

It makes total sense for them to return to the rich setting of the Oldest House from Control, but with no experience in multiplayer games or first person shooters, what could we expect from Firebreak? Thankfully, the folks at Remedy invited us to a preview event to get our hands on with the game to see what it’s all about.

Set six years after the events of Control, you and up to two of your friends play as members of the titular team, a group of first responders, as you try to contain the rampant forces of the Hiss that plague the Oldest House. To fight back against the hordes, you’ll use a combination of traditional guns and specialized tools that have been cobbled together during the lockdown. Given the strange objects of power that are kept in the Oldest House by the Federal Bureau of Control, the problems you’re trying to deal with are just as wild as the gear at your disposal.

When starting a mission, you’ll pick your gun and your Crisis Kit, the specialized tool that acts almost like your character’s class. The guns all fit into your pretty standard categories: pistols, shotguns, SMGs, etc. They all feel pretty good, if a little uninspiring. The slower guns particularly felt a little less effective, given the sheer amount of enemies you’re up against, but the machine gun I unlocked towards the end of my time really made the gunfights start to sing, so maybe later weapons will have a little more oomph to them.

The Crisis Kits were really interesting in the way they augmented your combat verbs rather than just being a different version of a weapon. Three kits are available in the game: the Jump Kit, the Fix Kit, and the Splash Kit. The Jump Kit features an electro-kinetic charge impactor, which sort of looks like a metal detector with a conductive plate at the end. The device can be charged up, delivering a stunning shock to enemies at close range. Eventually upgrades allow this to also be used to launch you up into the air to reach high places.

The Jump Kit feels great when used in tandem with the Splash Kit, which features a crank-operated water cannon that can stagger enemies at a distance. Wet enemies will conduct electricity more, so if you prime a group of Hiss with the water before zapping them with the Jump Kit, you’ll spread the effect to the whole group. Spraying your allies can also have beneficial effects, clearing them of certain conditions that pop up during jobs.

The Fix Kit features a wrench that has the dual purpose of heavy melee attacks and quick fixes to various machines that act as objectives around the level. An upgrade to the Fix Kit allows you to do a powerful rushing attack, which is great to plow through a crowd of wet, electrified enemies. It’s very easy to see how these kits are both very specialized and allow synergies between teammates, giving you an incentive to coordinate when the crowds of enemies get thick.

All of these kits have different ultimates that charge up throughout the mission, which can deal devastating attacks. Each of them is tied to a unique Object of Power, an everyday item that’s imbued with weird paranatural energy. I didn’t get a chance to unlock all of them personally, but the Piggy Bank I had for my Fix Kit was pretty fun, causing a coin tornado to rip through friend and foe alike. The kits also have a specific item that can eventually be unlocked, including things like a portable humidifier that acts as a healing beacon and a powerful turret to support you against enemies.

Even though there aren’t any specific limits to how many people with each kit are on your three man team, it still seems like having a couple more options to pick from would help the variety of this game. I know the weapons you unlock are going to allow you to mix it up a bit more, but it feels like the real variation in tactics come from the kits, so it would greatly benefit the game to have more of those available in the future.

The Hiss forces you’ll face are unsurprisingly similar to what you’ve seen in Control, featuring melee focused grunts, heavy gunners, flying threats, and aggressive exploding enemies. What did surprise me was the amount of enemies you’re facing, with large hordes that made it feel like Left 4 Dead at times. Generally, they seemed to come in timed waves that you were warned about, but once they arrived things got pretty chaotic as we attempted to stay alive. The enemies felt a tad too bullet-spongy, but once we got our rhythms down with our Crisis Kits we were able to synergize well enough to survive.

One thing I really loved about the setup of the game was the ways you could vary up the missions. We were able to try out three of the five jobs that the game will ship with: Hot Fix, Paper Chase, and Ground Control. The main structure of the mission is the same: get in, do some objectives, then return to the elevator for extraction. However, each job’s set of goals felt different and took place in a distinct location, giving them each a strong identity that set them apart, despite the enemies remaining the same. When you pick your job, you select both a threat level, which will determine how challenging the enemies will be, and a clearance level, which will determine how many zones you need to clear to complete the mission.

The idea of the clearance level is really unique, and it can drastically change a mission. For example, when we did Paper Chase on the first clearance level, we were in and out in about ten minutes, but when we tried it on level four, it took us about thirty minutes. One of the big principles they talked about when designing FBC: Firebreak was not wanting to make a game that felt like a huge time commitment, so I really love the idea of just being able to pick up the game and decide how long you wanted to commit to a single mission in an extremely clear manner.

Ammo and health are refilled at specific stations, tool benches and decontamination showers respectively, so things can get pretty desperate if you aren’t keeping track of where you can stock up. Much like Helldivers 2, your group has a pool of lives that’s shared among the group, so deciding if you want to plow through a horde to try to revive your teammate or just let them die and use up one of your lives is key to success in the game. We played on moderate threat level the whole time, and it felt really well-balanced. Most of the time, we got pretty low on lives every time, and we even lost a few missions while trying to extract.

The first mission was Hot Fix, which sends you down to the Maintenance Sector to repair the mysterious Furnace that’s blasting overwhelming heat. In the zones we explored, we were mostly climbing into big fans and repairing them to get the sectors cooled down while dealing with the Hiss, which was being supercharged by the heat. Using the Splash Kit and the decontamination shower were key to keeping your personal heat down as you explored, and you could also shoot at the sprinkler system in the environment to give you a temporary cooldown. The Fix Kit was also particularly useful here, as repairing fans was much easier using that than doing it manually, which required a little button pressing minigame.

Paper Chase had my favorite theming, setting you on a mission to clear out a Post-It note infestation in the Executive Sector. When entering a zone, there’s a massive number of notes you need to clear out, which is most effectively done when the notes are wet. It was cool to see the team get into a rhythm here, with one person wetting them with the Splash Kit, while one person blasted them away with the Jump Kit, as the last person was holding off enemies with the Fix Kit’s wrench. This is the one we went deepest into the clearance levels, and were treated with a climatic battle against “Sticky Ricky,” a massive being made of Post-It notes. This fight had us running around the arena, activating various machines to make it vulnerable to our weapons. I love a boss fight that keeps you moving with tasks to do aside from just shooting at the enemy, and this one was a blast.

The final mission, Ground Control, sent us into the Black Rock Quarry, where we had to eliminate strange leeches that were infesting the area. The Quarry was one of my favorite sections of Control, as it provided a surreal break from the brutalist office building, and it felt just as unique here. In this mission, you were shooting at glowing green leeches all over the walls in hopes of finding strange pearls that would fall out, which needed to be collected in a minecart. The catch: those pearls are radioactive as hell. Just being near them starts a radiation meter building on your character, which starts damaging you after reaching a certain level. Frequent trips to the shower were required to keep your radiation levels down, so we were setting up handoffs where one person would carry as far as they could, then drop the pearl to be picked up by the next. This might have been my favorite one gameplay-wise, and I really wish we had done later clearance levels of it, as I was curious how it would continue to evolve.

Remedy’s team has talked a lot about how even though this is going to be a live service game, they don’t want it to feel like a full-time job to keep up with everything. Guns, perks, cosmetics, and equipment can all be unlocked by currency that’s recovered while on missions, and it will be interesting to see how quickly you’ll be able to get through this. While there are six different clearance levels for each of the five missions, I’m curious if players will be satisfied by that amount of content. In the three hour session we had, we were only able to get one of the three missions up to clearance level four, and we didn’t even try escalating the threat level at all. Remedy has plans for adding two new jobs this year alongside other content, and more is apparently on the roadmap for 2026. All new jobs added to the game will be free to all players, and it appears anything additional that requires real money to purchase will be cosmetic in nature.

After getting my hands on FBC: Firebreak, I’m excited to see how the full game plays. The gunplay felt good, not great, but the Crisis Kits helped in making the game feel varied and strategic. Each mission felt wholly unique in both mechanics and setting, giving you clever objectives to complete as you deal with the Hiss forces. It always feels like a bummer to say this, but these types of games live and die by fans’ responses to the amount of content the team provides. Their talk of not wanting to give players a full-time job makes me think they might not have a huge roadmap of content aside from the two extra jobs, which is actually might be just fine in my book. If you’ve got a group of friends that like these types of games, I think you’ll be in for a treat with FBC: Firebreak.

Preview code provided by publisher. ‘FBC: Firebreak’ launches June 17 for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5. It will also be available day one on Xbox Game Pass.