Firefighting Simulator: Ignite PC review — A bit too charred but still nice and toasty

I love the idea of firefighting video games, but aside from being rare, they’re also often not very good. When I saw that Firefighting Simulator: The Squad was getting another installment, I grimaced. The original game had its bright spots, but was mostly subpar and the idea of that dev making another game was not a promising one. However, Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a brand new game by a wholly separate developer, so I steeled myself and jumped into the fire to find that this dev actually kind of nailed it a lot of the time with a game that really captures the spirit of firefighting. When your squad is willing to listen to you, at least.

Once again, you’re on a four-person firefighting team. While not on a job, you’ll find yourself at your headquarters where you’re free to wander, train, and change clothes (although I couldn’t ever figure out how to do this for the life of me.) You can either access the map from a monitor in the briefing room or directly from the menu. From there, you choose a main or side mission to embark on and can either drive or teleport directly there. This menu also lets you set a difficulty (on medium you’ll fail if half the victims die, on hard you’ll fail if even one does,) and decide if you want your squad to solely follow your orders or operate autonomously.

In the original game, they would only follow your orders. Until you gave those out, that meant your squad would stand around indefinitely unless you gave them commands. It’s the same here if they’re not set to autonomous, however. Choosing between these two basically lets you decide what you want to do, which is great if you’d prefer to do all the firefighting yourself, focus on rescuing victims, or go hunting for hazards to remove while the team does everything else. On autonomous, though, your squad mates really only fight fires and nothing else, but you can command them to search for people to rescue or hazards to shut off.

This is effective, but only when it works. A chunk of the time, squad mates simply won’t listen to you. When this happens, though, it’s usually just one of them, but it’s very aggravating when it pops up. Early on when I found myself downed by opening a door that caused a backdraft, my entire squad completely ignored my pleas for help and left me to die. You can order them to stand in certain places, fight specific fires, or rescue individuals. I’ve had them straight-up tell me no multiple times with zero reason. This is Firefighting Simulator: Ignite‘s biggest weakness, but it weirdly doesn’t make the game considerably more frustrating.

Regardless, this is still what the dev needs to focus on. The game loop itself is rather compelling. You can drive your chosen fire truck to the scene if you wish, at which point you’ll park, someone will set up the water flow to the truck, and you’ll get your attack hose and fit it with a water gun. The hose physics here are far better than those in the previous game, plus you can switch between third and first-person views at will. You can use halligans, axes, and circular saws to secure entry to certain places and rescuing victims tends to take precedence as they can indeed die if you’re slacking. These victims are either unconscious on the ground and must be picked up, or simply led to a paramedic if they’re upright.

Strangely, the conscious ones have zero agency and will stand stock still the entire time, even if they’ve got a clear pathway with no danger. Annoyingly, you can only carry one thing at a time, so if you want to have a halligan or axe on you to switch to in the middle of spraying a fire, you have to either put your hose down to go get one or command someone else to bring it to you or open it themselves. It’s an odd choice and I see no reason you can’t just carry one extra item. Similarly, you need to switch your truck’s output from water to foam to sop up flammable liquids, but you can’t radio this in and have to walk all the way back to the truck to do it, which is just silly.

The firefighting itself feels decent and your water gun has two kinds of sprays – one for wider areas at shorter range and a longer range one. The weird thing is, it doesn’t really feel like you’re putting out fires. The water gun itself feels more like a leaf blower and the fire seems to get blown away like leaves. It’s bizarre. But the way fire behaves and spreads feels far more true-to-life this time. Leave a fire unobserved and it can easily engulf an entire area. It’s possible to basically let a fire get away from you to the point where putting it out just isn’t feasible, even with you and your three squad mates all spraying it.

And that’s if they’ll spray it. While set to autonomous, your squad is prone to standing in one area and spraying a ceiling or wall that isn’t on fire, even if you’re battling a large blaze mere feet away. As such, you should not leave them on autonomous, as they can’t be trusted to do anything. As stated previously, there’s a lot they won’t do on autonomous, but there’s some mechanics they can’t even be commanded to do, although this is understandable. For instance, you can control a fire truck’s ladder to spray the roof or get access if you’d rather not use a normal ladder. The AI can’t do this at all, so you’ll have to do it yourself while playing solo, which isn’t a big deal.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite clearly has its fair share of issues, but it truthfully does better in most ways than pretty much any other firefighting game. Its performance is quite poor, as one might expect of a simulator game using Unreal Engine 5, usually averaging around 40 fps on medium settings with a 3090, but it looks pretty decent! The way a room intensely blazes orange really properly evokes the sense of heat that it should and the way the lighting changes upon more and more of the blaze being put out is a great touch. The way that pretty much each and every asset has a charred texture placed over it after burning really sells the experience as well, as does the way the environment gets wet after using the water gun. Fire can also damage floors, which can lead to you falling through to a lower one.

The game has a surprisingly large amount of content too, with missions varying between stores, warehouses, offices, residential areas (including both homes and apartments,) and more. You progress through the game by completing side missions which have randomized elements, despite following a set template, and main missions. These unlock major missions which can be considered akin to boss battles. How long missions take will depend on how much you want to do yourself versus how much you use your squad. Even with an autonomous squad, though, some can take the better part of an hour. But there are no checkpoints, so if the game crashes during a mission, you’ll lose all its progress. Thankfully, I didn’t have a single crash.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is simultaneously very impressive and somewhat questionable, but it’s probably the best actual firefighting game you can buy. It’s got a fun loop, there’s a wide variety of missions, and the gameplay is actually nicely realised. It would massively benefit from some serious patching, but you can’t really go horribly wrong if you want a firefighting game, especially if you’ve got friends to play with.

Your next read:

Postal: Brain Damaged – These Sunny Daze PC review — More of what’s already great |