6 things FBC: Firebreak refuses to explain

FBC: Firebreak shrouds itself in mystery, but arguably way too much, as a lot of players are coming away from their first few sessions with big questions about how it works. The game’s tutorial only takes you through how to enter missions, and just a few other mechanics are explained through easily missable pop-ups.

We’ll help you out by explaining some of the major mechanics that we had to work out on our own when we played the game.

Stick together or you’ll get a blue flash

One of the most confusing things for us was the blue flashes that occasionally happen on your screen with seemingly no rhyme or reason, as the game gives you no indication what they are or why they’re happening.

As it turns out, this is to indicate that you’ve gotten too far away from your teammates. When you’re close to each other, you get a shield that gives you a defensive bonus. It automatically regenerates when you’re near your team, but you lose it if you stray too far, and that’s what the blue flash is telling you.

Mash the elevator button

If you’ve struggled to survive in the 2 or 3 minutes the game makes you wait for the elevator at the end of a level, you should know that you don’t have to put up with it. If you go up to the button to call the elevator and mash it as hard as you can, it will accelerate the timer and make it arrive much quicker than usual. Just make sure someone’s covering you as you do it.

Documents are extra XP

If you want to requisition items, then you’ll need to earn XP to get the special currency, but you might not have noticed that there’s a way to get more of them in a level. When you kill special enemies or open shelters, you’ll find red dossiers containing classified documents, or sometimes even a leather briefcase. These items are actually giving you extra XP, and if you die, you’ll lose them, requiring you or your teammates to retrieve them.

Showers and taps are magic

You’ll be told that the shower you get in the green container at the start of every area heals you, but you might not realize the degree to which it does so. It doesn’t just replenish your HP, it also clears almost every single status condition in the game (aside from being wet, obviously). You also may have missed the fact that the taps in shelters do very slightly heal you, and you can spam them to get a bunch of healing out of them.

Fire makes monsters stronger

You might be tempted to follow the moniker “kill it with fire” when you see a monster in this game, but that would be a mistake. While being set on fire does slowly harm most monsters, it also makes them a lot stronger, empowering their attacks and, in some cases, making them more resistant to other forms of damage. You should actually be doing the opposite and trying to get monsters wet to weaken them.

You have limited respawns

This is something you’ll only work out when it’s too late. Above your team’s health bars in the bottom left corner of the screen, you’ll see a little number in green. This number indicates how many lives you have collectively remaining. While it is sometimes advantageous to take the quick respawn when you get downed, don’t do it too often or you’ll burn through your lives, which only start to regenerate once you hit zero, and it does so very slowly.