Firefighter: Pixel Action Game Review

Where’s the fire?

You look around the empty room, confused. This is the right address, you’re sure of it. You were called here because of a fire. Something isn’t right… clutching your standard issue firefighter shotgun, you take a step forward into the empty room.

That was the trigger. Suddenly several flaming portals appear on the floor all around you, releasing monstrous, flame-covered abominations to block your way.

Quickly, you ready your shotgun. Finally—time to put the fire out!

The Firefighter is on Scene

Developed by Alexplay FZCO, Firefighter: Pixel Action Game is a top-down auto-shooter. Play the role of a firefighter, enter burning buildings, and defeat hordes of fire-based monsters in order to save the day. To help you do so, you have a huge variety of weapons at your disposal, most of which don’t resemble any kind of fire extinguisher that I’ve ever seen. They are still fairly effective, though.

Huge Flames

Firefighter leans heavily onto its retro aesthetics both in the graphics and the soundtrack. Every aspect of the title has that distinct “modern retro” style, from the clean pixel graphics to the advanced chiptunes. The sound effects are snappy, making it satisfying to shoot your weapons while wandering the burning buildings, taking out any fire-based thing that gets in your way.

When I say “burning buildings,” I mean it in the most generous way possible. Most of the buildings you’ll be wandering in don’t actually seem at all burned. It’s the fire monsters that appear upon your arrival that you have to deal with. In that sense, you’re not much of a firefighter, and more like a… fire fighter.

The Firefighter Has the Snipe Rifle

Firefighter: Pixel Action Game consists of two main gameplay sections. The first one is the inventory management. It’s quite simple: you have four equipment slots (hat, vest, gloves and boots) and four weapon slots that you can fill with various items that you find during gameplay. Every item has a range of statistics that define what they’re good for. Additionally, each item has a randomly selected passive independent of the item itself. Do you want more defense? More damage? Healing upon defeating enemies? Choose accordingly.

There is no limit to the weapons you can equip. You can mix and match any weapon types, or even equip four copies of the same weapon if you want. My favorite setup was four sniper rifles, but everyone can find the right combination for their own playstyle—be it keeping to long range with slow but powerful shots, dodging around and going in short range to finish enemies with rapid fire, or even a mixture in order to be ready for any situation.

Spray and Pray

Once you geared up, it’s time to get on scene. Firefighter consists of six missions, each with six stages—five normal ones and one boss stage. The normal stages are mostly the same: slowly trudge through hallways connecting a few rooms, each room spawning a dozen enemies for you to fight.

This is where my two main complains about the game come in. First of all, while there are several enemies you can encounter, most of them look rather similar. Of course, all of them have to follow some kind of fire theme, but this results in them sharing the same color palette: red, yellow and orange. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they had distinct behavior, but mostly, they don’t. The enemies always magnetize towards your position (occasionally getting stuck on the terrain), and once they’re in attacking range, they attack. This makes them very predictable, which is a good thing considering the second problem:

Since Firefighter is an auto-shooter, all you have to do is stand in weapon range of an enemy in order to shoot them. But that’s the keyword: stand. You cannot shoot while moving, meaning that attacking and dodging are mutually exclusive actions. Since most weapons have at least a brief aiming time, any short-ranged weapon becomes very risky to use at all. There is a way to roll, but it’s too clunky to rely on.

You can freely switch between the four weapons you brought with you. Each weapon has a number of shots, after which it goes on cooldown and you cannot use it until it’s ready again—in this case, you automatically switch to the next weapon and keep shooting. You can double tap a weapon to manually start this timer and reload in safety. Since most weapons have only a few shots, it’s advisable to pick weapons of similar reach unless you can play around your range constantly growing and shrinking.

The Cost of Safety

Being a free mobile phone game, Firefighter: Pixel Action Game of course has in-app purchases. After every stage, you receive a loot chest. There are two types of chests: normal and gold. To open a normal chest, you either have to wait two hours or watch an ad. For a gold chest, you have wait six hours or spend paid currency. In either case, you can only have a total of one chest ‘being opened’ at a time, so sooner or later, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with chests you have to open somehow. After opening a chest, you get the option to upgrade one of the items you received from it. How? That’s right! By watching an ad!

The paid currency’s primary purpose, beyond opening gold chests, is to purchase various other currencies in order to upgrade your equipment: gold, tokens and blueprints. It’s basically a shortcut to getting stronger faster.

If you think watching ads and collecting tokens is too much hassle, you can also opt to buy a VIP membership—a temporary benefit package that gives you materials every day, automatically queues chests for opening, and removes all ads.

For a free game, Firefighter has quite some microtransactions in it. But it’s a free mobile game, I can’t necessarily fault it for that. What I can fault it for is playing it too safe. There are numerous auto-shooter games on the market that are free and put more thought and effort into their design. As such, the title has to really stand out in some way, and while it has some unique mechanics and ideas, it ultimately fails to be anything more than a clunky alternative.  The free-roam aspect and the slowed-down gameplay could be reasons to play Firefighter, but if those aren’t a priority for you, you’re better off choosing something else.