Technologies

FBC: Firebreak: 9 Beginner Tips to Survive Your First Shift

If you want to make it out of the Oldest House alive, you’ll have to work together with your teammates to utilize every tool at your disposal.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Technologies

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Endless Gaming Crossovers

In navigating my own love-hate relationship with this phenomenon, I talked to some of the devs behind them to get a better sense of how these crossovers work and why companies pursue them.

When my friends want to play Magic: The Gathering, I wade through my two-dozen or so decks built for Commander — the card game’s casual, multiplayer format. I might choose the deck built around Elenda, the Dusk Rose, a vampire saint who can create legions of vampires. Maybe I’ll take my Narset, Enlightened master deck, which lets me cast powerful spells for free when she attacks. Both Elenda and Narset are original characters from Magic: The Gathering.

Or maybe I’ll grab my Lightning, Army of One deck, constructed around the Final Fantasy 13 character, so I can attack people for absurdly high amounts of damage. Maybe my Godzilla deck will engage in glorious combat against my friends’ decks led by characters from Dracula or Warhammer 40K. Would Eowyn from Lord of the Rings be a better match-up against the forces of the Imperium?

It’s a double-edged sword, this impulse toward crossovers. And it’s happening in games far beyond Magic: The Gathering.

Overwatch featured skins from Persona 5 in September, Halo armor and weapons showed up in Helldivers 2, and edgy looter shooter Borderlands 4 is showing up in… golf game PGA Tour 2K25. The crossover crown lies eternally with Fortnite, thanks to its never-ending influx of skins from games, movies, comics and real-life celebrities — leading players using the Sabrina Carpenter skin to stop shooting each other and, say, hold impromptu concerts instead.

When the elements fit each other are handled with care, it’s a fun way for fans to engage with multiple interests simultaneously. But when it feels carelessly thrown-together or when the elements don’t mesh, it can feel like a cash grab that hollows out the original property. And what works for one player might feel egregious or immersion-breaking to another.

«Am I the problem?» I ask myself, as I work on a fourth Magic deck built around a Final Fantasy character, after spending hundreds of dollars on cards and accessories from the set.

I do realize that the money I spent on the release event and weekly drafts screamed to Hasbro, «It’s working!» At the same time, playing with cards from that Final Fantasy set was also the most fun I’ve had with Magic in several years.

Corporations betting big on brand crossovers feels like the unavoidable consequence of a world in which players look more and more for customization and ways to show off their personalities and interests, which dovetails with companies looking for lucrative ways to attract new players and increase revenue in ongoing games. Is other media filtering into popular games about the joy of including familiar faces, or does it turn characters into digital bumper stickers, starved of their identity from their original context?

The answer, like it or not, is both.

Money is a big part of the motivation, but expanding reach and offering customization also factor in

Blending different properties together generally requires an intense collaboration between the property owners and the game inviting the crossover. So what makes these gaming collaborations worth it for those parties?

There’s a financial incentive, to be certain, as Hasbro has made astonishingly clear. In its second-quarter 2025 earnings call, CEO Chris Cox noted that Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy set made $200 million in revenue in one day, while it took the Lord of the Rings set six months to hit that milestone. To put those two collaborations in the context of original Magic: The Gathering sets, the bestselling Magic set before Lord of the Rings was Modern Horizons, which made $200 million over two years.

Admittedly, $200 million in 24 hours is performance that Magic: The Gathering will likely struggle to replicate, even with the overabundance of outside properties coming next year: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Hobbit, Star Trek and Marvel. Still, Cox said the company feels good about the collaborations set to launch next year in terms of pleasing players and bringing in revenue. And Final Fantasy ultimately points to the financial power of a good gaming crossover, one where the properties are handled thoughtfully and intentionally (even if some of that intention is making the collaboration more collectible).

To better understand how and why these crossovers happen, I talked with some of the people powering these gaming collaborations.

There were «a lot of clues» both internally and externally that Magic could support these kinds of crossovers in the game, said Aaron Forsythe, Magic: The Gathering’s vice president of research and development.

Sets like Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy can also help funnel new players into a game that has been around since 1993.

«With Final Fantasy, we have seen a marked increase in play participation, especially among players who haven’t previously participated in our Organized Play programs,» said Rebecca Shepard, the vice president of franchise for Magic: The Gathering. That participation also extends after the launch of sets based on the other properties, which Magic brands Universes Beyond.

She noted that Universes Beyond releases also lead to increased interest in older products, demonstrating the crossovers’ ability to drive interest in the game’s original creations.

Magic’s designers have spent decades creating multiple in-game worlds or «planes» with their own lore, characters and mechanics. To a certain degree, crossovers are baked into its premise.

But what about something with a considerably smaller scope, like the hero shooter Overwatch 2? The team-based game is set in nearish future Earth, where other Blizzard games like Diablo and Starcraft are minimal parts of the world as references and outfits. But aside from a small Lego crossover, other external properties were mostly only winked at… until the game introduced skins from the popular manga and anime One-Punch Man back in 2023.

The game’s collaborations started out as infrequent events, but now show up roughly every season.

The Overwatch team was nervous for its first collaboration and took a cautious approach, said Aimee Dennett, Overwatch’s associate director of product management. Devs wanted to ensure that heroes were still recognizably Overwatch characters while also maintaining the integrity of the game’s lore. The solution was described as «our characters are cosplaying,» meaning that the Overwatch heroes maintain the iconic parts of their visual identity, while incorporating elements that are recognizable as the characters from the crossover properties.

There are also internal motivations for these opportunities.

«We’ve found that it has such a positive effect on the team,» said Overwatch’s Art Director, Dion Rogers. People who work on the game are also fans of these properties, and the opportunity to design those crossovers can be a creative spark for the developers.

Fortnite didn’t start the party, but it did invite basically everyone

Fortnite is the de facto example of crossovers in gaming. It represents an astonishing evolution of a concept that kicked off decades ago.

Video game publishers were firmly protective of their properties to keep their games unique, but gaming website Giant Bomb asserts that crossovers started in earnest with 1992’s Battle Soccer, where Godzilla could take the pitch against giant mech Gundams and superheroes from Japanese TV. A few years later, Marvel’s X-Men faced off against Street Fighter characters in a move that would eventually spawn the Marvel vs. Capcom series of fighting games.

Crossovers ramped up in the 2000s with Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake as the first two characters not owned by Nintendo to show up in Smash Bros. Brawl, a few years before horror movie villain Freddy Krueger first appeared in a Mortal Kombat game. Thematically, these all make some sense — but Fortnite took crossovers to another level.

The crossovers started with the Infinity Gauntlet limited-time mode, where players could transform into Thanos, the villain of the 2019 film Avengers: Infinity War. It was quickly followed by the first Marvel-themed skins for Black Widow and Star-Lord that any player could wear. That kicked off a wave of Fortnite crossovers that would grow beyond Marvel to also include DC Comics, Star Wars, celebrities and various other games.

More have followed in Fortnite’s wake. The jump to include characters from other media besides video games has proven popular, with games like Mortal Kombat bringing in the villainous superhuman Homelander from The Boys, and the asymmetrical PVP horror game Dead by Daylight leaning heavily into killers and survivors from various games and movies — and also Nicolas Cage as himself, delivering some truly amazing voice lines.

Still, when it comes to bringing in everything from everywhere, nothing tops Fortnite, where crossover events feel less like guest stars and more like the first stop for major franchise promotion. And the cumulative results are, for lack of a better word, bonkers. Now a squad of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and Sabrina Carpenter can face off against a squad made up of Darth Vader, the Joker, Thanos and Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero… and then perform *NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye dance on the villains’ corpses.

Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, declined to comment for this story.

Convenience and customization… at a cost

While crossovers with other properties help bring revenue and new players into games, they also risk alienating players whose primary interest is in their games’ original concepts and who may feel the crossovers move the game away from its identity.

«We listen and learn more than folks realize but at the same time, our goal of making Magic for everyone — because it is — can also frustrate our existing players,» said Shepard in response to a question about the feedback to Universes Beyond and the seemingly polarized responses online.

You can see that frustration in videos from prominent Magic creators, with titles like «The Problems With Universes Beyond — Even if You’re NOT a Hater» and «Half of Magic: The Gathering Will Not Be Magic: The Gathering.» The discussions in those videos touch on multiple elements, but center around the proportion of and execution of Universes Beyond sets and how those sets do or don’t gel with the rest of the game.

That tension exists with most gaming crossovers. I wasn’t initially a fan of Overwatch’s move into collaborations. For me, the image of Doomfist in a yellow suit and flowing cape cheapened a character who’s supposed to be a surly big bad in the Overwatch universe. To me, it felt tonally mismatched with his identity, and I feared Overwatch feeling less like Overwatch as a result.

But the response I saw was largely positive. A change being celebrated doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the game, nor does outcry mean a change is bad. But there were clearly people who wanted the customization and expression of anime skins, highlighting the tension inherent in gaming collaborations like this.

Magic’s Aaron Forsythe acknowledged the competing interests, saying, «Players that have been with us for a while don’t feel the need for a change of this magnitude, and I appreciate how this hits them. But we’re doing this both because we want to grow the game — and we are — and because we think it’s another really fun way to enjoy it.»

For longstanding fans who have played the game for years, perhaps even decades, it may feel like the resources for the game’s original ideas are being diverted to fuel crossovers.

There are degrees, though. In the case of Magic: The Gathering, one-time Secret Lair drops like Sonic the Hedgehog that mostly show up in casual multiplayer formats may not seem as disruptive. But over the course of next year, Magic will release four more sets based on outside properties, bringing the total to seven such sets in two years. More than any individual card or set, that density of outside properties might feel particularly unwelcome, contributing to the feeling that it’s just Fortnite now.

Everyone is here (and here to stay)

I think a lot of the response to crossovers comes down to two things: how well the concept fits and how good the execution is. Fortnite itself has become a conglomeration of various game types — from Battle Royale to Lego to Ballistic, festivals and Creative modes — so the game featuring skins from all kinds of movies, games and celebrities sort of fits into that «everything for everyone» idea.

Something like Dead by Daylight is an example of using crossovers with a narrower focus, incorporating horror icons that fit its gameplay and lore. Resident Evil characters trying to escape from Halloween’s Michael Myers doesn’t make total sense, but there’s enough of an internal logic in the genres of slasher films and survival horror games for it to work.

And, despite my initial reservations about Overwatch’s collaborations, I was immediately enthralled when I saw Kiriko’s Suki skin from Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to giving me a new outlet for my favorite character from the show, it just fit the visual identity and the concept of the Overwatch hero, a protector in her own right.

The people behind the games acknowledge how much that matters. «If we don’t do this right,» Overwatch’s Rogers told me, «the fans will call us out.» Players have their own ideas of what fits and what doesn’t, and they aren’t shy about voicing those feelings. But Rogers said that getting it right instead helps maintain the identity of the game’s heroes.

Similarly, Magic’s Shepard said one step in the process of evaluating potential crossovers is feeling out whether it feels like «an authentic relationship» for the game and its players. The challenge, however, is that each player’s mileage will vary when it comes to that authenticity.

There’s no putting these crossovers back in the box, for better and worse. We’ll continue to have more options to play as our favorite characters across a variety of games. Right now, if I wanted to, I could fire up Street Fighter 6 and play a game as Chun-Li in the context of her original series. I could then swap over to Fortnite and run around sniping people as Chun-Li before logging into Overwatch and playing as Juno in her Chun-Li skin, healing people with a Martian mediblaster. And then over the weekend, I could play Magic: The Gathering with my friends and pull out a deck built around a Chun-Li character card.

For Chun-Li superfans, that’s great. At the same time, my Magic opponents may be sick of playing against characters from Stranger Things, Jurassic Park and Marvel, which might break the immersion of the game for them.

The demand is there and the complaints are valid. Companies will follow the money. But each game’s developers have to find their own way of squaring the crossover — justifying (or not) how another creative world collides with theirs.

For Overwatch’s Dennett, as the game grows and changes, so does the team’s philosophy about collaborations — because pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the hero shooter sparks the imaginations of its player base.

«It’s sort of a self-reinforcing cycle, where our players grow and change so much, and so do the types of collaborations, and the types of collaborations change, which grows and changes our players.»

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Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, Nov. 21

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Nov. 21.

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