Perhaps one of the most surprising disappointments of 2025 comes from a studio that most players never anticipated.FBC: Firebreakreleased earlier this year to extremely mixed reviews and has had incredibly underwhelming player interest since launch. It’s hard to believe this game comes from the same studio that brought usControland theAlan Wakefranchise, not to mention the quintessential third-person shooter classic,Max Payne.
Remedy Entertainment seems to have fallen from great heights withFBC: Firebreak, with a 24-hour peak player count onSteamof just around 50 people. While there were certainlyworse games released this year, such as the infamousMindsEye, FBC: Firebreak’s abysmal launch is among the more heartbreaking failures for fans of Remedy Entertainment’s and its past successes.
Remedy Has Fallen From Great Heights With FBC: Firebreak
FBC: Firebreak Has Bigger Problems Than Bug Fixes
FBC: Firebreakwas a resounding letdown for critics and players alike, withScreenRant’s ownFirebreakreviewnoting its underwhelming,“anemic"gameplay, and giving it just a 4 out of 10 (which is generous given the game’s inherent issues). Aside from beingplagued by bugs and performance problems,FBC: Firebreakhas bigger things to worry about that are part of its core design.
Notably,Firebreak’sincredibly redundant and repetitive online gameplay doesn’t give players much incentive to jump back in for another run, and the game fails to hook you in its initial stages. While it isn’t technically a live-service game, it certainly feels like one, andplayers have shown waning interest since its release, with the game garnering"Mostly Negative” reviews on Steam. In anupdateover the weekend,FBC: Firebreakdevs laid out a roadmap for future improvements, but highlighted its core issue:
We’ve seen many players come into the game and leave within the first hour. And that’s because our first hour can be frustrating; you feel ineffective and confused as to what to do.
This is a fundamental hurdle that will take serious work to overcome, and it’s hard to say whether players will return, even after the game receives major fixes in the coming months.
Despite Planned Updates, FBC: Firebreak May Never Recover
Firebreak Faces An Uphill Battle
While Remedy promises to roll out major updates to improve the overall experience,many fans of the studio checked out permanently from theFBC: Firebreakexperience.The studio is discussing updates that by and large should have been included in the initial launch of the game, but for one reason or another didn’t make it in. This fact, along with four major patches in as many weeks, gives the impression that the game was rushed and incomplete, and it ultimately has left a bad taste in players' mouths.
FBC: Firebreakis considerably lacking compared to the studio’s previous hits, and it’s unclear whether any future updates to the game will be able to fix its fundamental problems.
The major difference betweenFBC: Firebreakand Remedy’s previous successful games likeControlcomes down to a void of narrative depth, uninspired gameplay, and a failure to be able to hook players or bring them back for more.FBC: Firebreakis considerably lacking compared to the studio’s previous hits, and it’s unclear whether any future updates to the game will be able to fix its fundamental problems.
