There have been firefighting games for as long as there have been video games, but for whatever reason – and I’ll speculate about it in a moment – there has never been one. big a. fire commander is the latest game to try and break this duck, and while it doesn’t make it, at least I admire the way it tries.
fire commander was developed by Pixel Crow—to remind Beat agent?– and Atomic Wolf, and was released last week on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. It works like a real-time tactics game, only instead of shooting at Nazis you put out fires, and in between missions there’s a whole strategic side to the game that can best be summed up as “XCOMbut with gyms for firefighters”.
I think the main reason there’s never been a great firefighting game is that, as exciting as the subject may be on the news or in movies, in reality most fires are fought in an incredibly routine way. And fire itself, while certainly a danger, just doesn’t lend itself to being a great opponent in a game the way a real enemy does. Sure, it’s dangerous, but it’s also usually slow, and in most cases you beat it by… aiming a snake at it.
fire commander tries to get around this by ceasing all simulation attempts. If you want to gain insight into how fires are actually fought and what a day in the life of a firefighter actually looks like, this isn’t the game for you. At almost every point in this game, fire commander is dumping reality in the name of sacrificing fun and strategic gameplay, and while this is disappointing in some ways – I used to work for NSW Fire & Rescue and would love to see someone actually get a decent simulation done – in most respects it is understandable, and the game all the better for it.
As I said, fire commander is split into two sections. The first, played between missions, lets you oversee your fire station and the roster of firefighters, and when you’ve played XCOM you already know what’s going on here. You can equip and train your existing firefighters, recruit new ones and expand or upgrade your base. It’s fine, and it all works, but I’ve never found the challenge as I think it should be, because my firefighters would get XP so quickly that resting and replacing never felt as urgent as it needed to be.
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Most of your time in fire commander however, is spent on a mission, and this is where things got a lot more fun. After giving up any attempt at realism, the developers have instead built a real-time tactics game based on you picking the right person for the right job at the right time.
Every job you attend has some sort of time limit, like a fire spreading to something explosive, or a number of civilians that are in danger and need to be rescued before it’s too late. In the way is the fire itself, which must be extinguished, but also a number of environmental challenges such as closed doors (that have to be chopped open with axes) and obstacles that can only be overcome by a certain class of firefighters.
This class division is frustrating in many ways – why can’t every firefighter use a circular saw or a computer!?! – but like I said, it’s one of the design concessions made to make this a game, and once the initial complaint subsided and I started thinking of everyone as “techies” or “rogues” it was fine.
So the key to completing each individual mission is to find the fastest way to complete each objective, because the longer you let a fire spread, or an office worker in a room filling with smoke, the harder your job will become. . I rarely got a job on the first try; instead, it would take a few tries, as I had to optimize which firefighters I sent to each corner of the map, and make sure they were doing the right job when they got there.
Again, this was frustrating at first, as having to constantly restart missions in a game that superficially had so much in common with a real-time tactics game felt like bullshit. Certainly a game that had so much in common with, say, Steel Division should test me during the mission, not just present me a single puzzle at the beginning and leave the rest to my execution?
However, start thinking of each mission as a run and it starts to make more sense. Fewer Steel DivisionLake neon white. Every mission will unfold the same from the beginning, so a successful orbit in fire commander is more about perfecting your plan – multiple actions can be queued at any time, even before the mission starts – and then executing that plan to perfection.
When you’ve mastered something fire commander trying to do here—Use firefighters as a shop window for a unique real-time tactics experience, rather than simulating the work of a firefighter– it can be a lot of fun. Moving around a map and shooting bad guys has been done 1,000 times before, but coordinating a team to contain an expanding fire, clean up chemical spills and drag unconscious civilians out of a burning restaurant (sometimes all at once) was a new challenge.
It’s far from perfect, of course, and I don’t want to sound like this is a contender for the strategy game of the year. Even considering the lack of realism, there are still some bizarre decisions here, such as not letting firefighters break large windows next to closed doors, or giving everyone a portable water tank instead of using hoses, which again is clearly designed to a challenge (forces you to juggle firefighters who have to race back to a truck to refuel), but which is a huge pain in the butt in execution.
Most shocking, and despite my overall love for this “genre” of European disaster and Transport management (if you can call it that at all), it’s full of annoying little quirks like simple tasks that require multiple clicks, and pathfinding that send firefighters on bizarre journeys around the map, and sometimes… right into fires. It’s a janky pitch, another one that worries (or prioritises) its nuts and bolts over its shine, and I knew this was going to get in, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
BUT. I’m a forgiving man when it comes to these kinds of games because as broken as they can be, and as unforgivable as that can be in so many other circumstances, when it comes to Euro management games I am willing to overlook a lot because these games are like that seriously. This wide genre has limited budgets and is play for a limited audience, so it’s unfair to expect the world of his games. They do their best, damn it, and in this case fire commander does enough that is new and interesting that I could work around the rougher edges.
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