Remedy’s imaginative yet muddled shooter FBC: Firebreak is spooling up for a major update in September, one which will add a new mission to the game and plans several much-needed mechanical adjustments. But in the meantime, the cooperative Control spinoff has released one last quality-of-life patch to set the stage for next month.
Patch 1.5 makes numerous tweaks to combat encounters, improving spawn timings for the possessed minions of the Hiss, while rebalancing the composition of enemy waves. Both of these could be extremely haphazard in the original version, as I discussed in my FBC: Firebreak review, so it’s pleasing to hear Remedy has tried to smooth things out.
Alongside this, the patch improves the presentation of the end-of-round “results” screen, and provides another round of bug-blasting, including a particularly amusing fix to an issue where “shooting the sticky notes with the burning rounds perk made them wet.” As Remedy itself notes “that’s not how fire works, even in the Oldest House.”
Yet the change which mainly caught my eye—and the one I’m about to clamber onto my soapbox to yell about—is a new option to switch off standard enemy health bars. This may seem like a minor feature, but I think it could have a much bigger impact on Firebreak’s combat than you might expect. That’s because health bars in first-person shooters suck, and if I had my way, I would eradicate them from every game in the genre.
As you can probably tell, this is a big pet hate of mine—so huge it should probably be illegal for me to keep it as a pet. For starters, placing health bars above, below, or generally around FPS enemies creates a similar issue to the ‘minimap problem’ in driving games, whereby instead of paying attention to the wondrously crafted city you’re scooting around, you’re staring at a tiny top-down map in the corner of the screen. Likewise, having health bars all over the place in an FPS results in you focussing on those health bars rather than all the glorious action.
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More importantly, though, health bars are a phenomenally boring way to represent damage in a shooter. One of the reasons the recent Doom games are so fun is that damage is represented by the physical condition of the demons. You know when a hellknight is approaching death because they look like they got sucked through a jet engine and then landed in a pool filled with live piranhas. All that feedback should be embedded into the combat, not garlanded around it in the UI.
You might argue such holistic damage representation is less precise than a health bar. I’d counter that this is good, actually. You should never know exactly how much damage you’re dishing out in an FPS—that nonsense is for ARPGs. When you expose all the hard stats, you transform a shooter from a whirlwind that you feel and intuit your way through into a tedious numbers game
Instead, the joy of a shooter comes from not knowing precisely when an opponent will fall. The surprise of an enemy dying faster than you expect, the shock when a shotgun blast in Doom doesn’t immediately kill an imp, the relief when a massive tank of an enemy collapses as you teeter on a shred of health. That’s what makes them thrilling.
This is why I think Firebreak’s option is an improvement, even without all the additional damage gubbins I mentioned. It’s worth noting the option doesn’t switch off every health bar in the game; enemies that have a shield or armour will still display a bar representing that additional protection. Again, this is something you could display on enemies themselves by having armour which visibly crumbles as you shoot it. But fewer health bars overall is still a huge positive.
In any case, I’m glad to see Remedy striving to improve Firebreak. While I enjoyed its goofy mission concepts, said missions simply weren’t big enough to sustain the game long term, while those balancing issues I mentioned often meant they oscillated between way too easy or preposterously hard. The good news is that Remedy is fully aware of Firebreak’s existing problems, and with luck, September’s big update will see a significant improvement in its fortunes.
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