izigame.me

As someone who has 800 hours in DRG, 600 in payday 2, 250 in Helldivers, and 122 in L4D2 I have a strong love for the PVE horde shooter genre and was interested in the trailers I saw for FBC FIREBREAK, keep in mind this is coming from the Perspective who never played control or Remedy's projects or heard good things about them.
After 11 hours, while I did enjoy it there have been some major caveats that prevents me from actively recommending this game. I will start off with some positives though
1. Love the idea, having an team of First Respondents that consist of volunteers fighting abnormalities and other extra dimensional shenanigans for the Federal Bureau of Control is just a great idea, and it a great premise for a game
2. The limited weaponry, while this is a contentious point and a lot of people here complain about only 6 weapons, as someone who came from Payday I much rather prefer a small range of weapons that differ from each other quite a bit rather than 300 weapons with 270 weapons being useless or inferior to something else.
3. The Perk System, for it just starting out I will say there is quite a solid system here, with a lot of build customization to tailor to your weapon, build, and mission as well with having up to 9 perk slots, it can make for a lot of personal choice in what you want.
4. The mission concepts and abnormalities are great, having to fix an immensely hot blasting furnace. self reproducing mass of sticky notes, globules sticking to engine to power the facility, the mission concepts or unique. And the abnormalities that in each area will negatively effect the mission is cool and can make for an interesting challenge
Now unfortunately I have to get into quite a bit of the negatives this game has
1. EDIT: They have since changed progression and put all weapons and toolkit upgrades into it's own separate page, making this original point mute. Good change!
2. The early experience it just kinda sucks, cause of that pass system and that you start with just clearance one missions, what your experiences is that missions barely last 8 minutes, the game fails to clearly tell you what to do at times, since the missions you DO have available only have 2 shelters and just 1 threatening enemy you barely get the points needed to upgrade the pass and I can see why it gave the idea that progression in this game is immensely slow. Progression is significantly improves once you reach clearance 3 with corruption 3 as with 6 shelters, and 4 threatening enemy spawns, I was able to gain 70 slips in just one mission of that length.
3. The Missions are unfortunately very short. As mentioned when doing clearance 1 missions they at most last 8 minutes, and if you know what you are doing they are even SHORTER, Hot Fix and Frequency Shift are especially egregious as they can take what feels like only 3 minutes to finish once you know what to do, fast enough that not even 1 threatening enemy spawns. While this is partially fixed by Clearance 3, it still feels like you are going through them way too quickly
4. The abnormalities just don't do anything at times mainly cause when playing decently they get destroyed before having any lasting effect. Due to there being a shelter in every area you can always go there to grab the black rock gun to destroy it, due to the length of running towards the shelter the first Abnormality lasts the longest. However the blackrock gun has more significantly more ammo needed to destroy an abnormality, so you can carry it to the next section and if the next one is just right there you can destroy it before it can even do anything, even if it isn't directly in your path just having the blackrock gun in hand before entering a new area makes the time to take them out significantly shorter, further impacted in that more than 1 blackrock gun can spawn. The only abnormality that avoids this is the Table Saw due to how disruptive having no shields is when facing that first wave of hiss in a new area. Overall abnormalities just don't survive long enough to have an impact in a mission and when they do survive sometimes it isn't all that noticeable for some.
5. Now this is probably the biggest issue this game has, the lack of variety, which is the biggest killer here. There have been a lot of complains in the reviews of lack of content but I think it's really just a lack of variety. I will break this into 2 segments over going the mission variety and enemy variety
5a. This is the smaller issue of lack of variety as enemy variety makes for a more fun game, but as it stands it's still disappointing once you clear a clearance 3 your have essentially figured it all out, it would be nice to have some layout change so that you have some variety in approach instead of just taking the same path or route as you always do, even something as simple as switching around where the junction boxes are for lights would be great cause as it stands from my experience there is always one junction box in each room which will always be in the same spot. Would be nice to have to actually search a few potential spawns instead of just going directly to the box to fix it.
5b. The enemy variety is unfortunately lacking. Mainly for a lot of these while there is some priority it doesn't fell all that impactful. A lot of his just feel like something you can dump bullets and the bigger enemies don't feel that threatening for you to target them. The only 2 threats in this game is the Hiss Charged as their self detonation deals a significant amount of damage and the Hiss Distorted as their invisibility and massive close range aoe damage that you need to kill them, but with any focused fire or just the rifle they can very quickly be killed. In this game we have cannon fodder (melee, ranged, and flying ranged), the trooper, big guys with a weakspot on their back, the hiss distorted, hiss charged, and the paper enemies only on clearance 2 of paper chase. That's only 7 different enemy types. Keep in mind L4D2 amongst the uncommon infected has 8 special infected that are all high priority or at least disrupt your pace, Payday 2 has 6 types of special enemies where multiple are either a high priority for you to kill as fast as possible or if you don't have the tools you have to avoid at the best of your abilities, and DRG has a spawn pool of 16 enemies and this doesn't even include biome specific, random spawn chance enemies, passive mobs, or ALL THE RIVALS. The lack of enemy variety that change the flow of the mission and how to approach any engagement is easily the biggest flaw of this game and what makes it feel really repetitive.
5b. Edit, as of patch 1.2 they did slightly address this, mainly in increasing enemy health so that enemies don't immediately die, and that the powerful enemies and just larger enemies survive for longer and can cause more nuisance. It's a good chance but would like some units that are more common in other PVE horde shooters like units the immobilize or separate you from your team if not careful like the Smoker from L4D2, Mactera Grabber in DRG, or Trapper in Darktide. Or a an actually serious long range threat like a sniper. Just more unique enemies would greatly improve the combat gameplay
I REALLY want to like this game, and want to have a lot of fun with it with friends, but there's just some massive glaring issues with it that prevent me from recommending this game. That said there will be a fall update with a new mission type and weapons, and what I am hoping is that we get new enemies that actually affect how you approach a combat scenario or just more threats, or more randomization in the missions, something that makes it feel like I already faced all the encounters and scenarios this game has to offer in just 11 hours