In Flame Over, you don the bright yellow helmet of firefighter Blaze Carruthers as he battles ferocious flames across 4 unique areas and 16 different floors. Armed with a limited supply of water and foam, you'll have to do battle with aggressive fires that will happily spread all across the building if you can't quickly put them out.
Each floor is procedurally generated, so you'll never play the same level twice. Floors consist of about 12 or so different rooms, most of which are engulfed in flames. Starting in the exit room, you'll quickly notice a timer at the top of the screen and a minimap and a couple gauges on the HUD that show how much water and foam you have available. The amount you can carry is limited, but you can always return to the exit room for a refill. There are also fire extinguishers, sinks, and water coolers scattered around the building that can also be used for one-time refills.
You start each run with just five minutes on the clock. This is hardly enough time to beat one floor, let alone the entire game, so you'll have to find ways to increase that time. This is done by saving civilians that are trapped in the building. There are usually about five or so civilians on each floor and each one you save and return to the exit will add one minute to your timer. This makes saving them one of the absolute priorities in the game. When you walk into a room and you notice civilians in there, do everything you can to quell the fires near them as quickly as possible and walk them to safety.
Every other floor features one special civilian named Miss Ion. She will give you a mission to complete while on that floor, usually simple fetch quests like find a hidden red briefcase or collect all the jewels in the safe. If you manage to keep her alive and complete her mission, you'll be awarded with two minutes of extra time as well as an upgrade token that can be used on the (extremely valuable) permanent upgrades.
Before each run you're able to unlock and purchase permanent upgrades using Miss Ion tokens and money that you've earned from extinguishing fires. These upgrades can be lifesavers (specifically Fire Proof and Caretaker Discount) so focus on unlocking and buying these as quickly as you can. You'll find in your first several runs of Flame Over that you don't get very far. These upgrades will help you get a lot farther, so do your best to complete the early Miss Ion missions on each of your runs.
The floors that don't have Miss Ion on them instead have a show where you can buy items to make your life easier. Increased water tanks and extinguishers are excellent for progressing in the later levels and the defibrillator is a godsend for reviving downed civilians if the flames overwhelm them before you can save them. You can also purchase additional health and time at the shop among other things. Items appear randomly so sometimes you'll end up with some great options and sometimes there won't be anything worthwhile to purchase.
Flame Over is a roguelike/roguelite and death is pseudo-permanent. Any items you buy at the shop will be gone. The game does allow you to spend any gold you find on upgrades before your next run, but anything not spent is also lost. Upgrade tokens do mercifully care over between runs. Aside from that, everything else starts fresh on every new run.
The controls for Flame Over take a bit of time to get used to, but for the most part they work very well. The game plays similar to an isometric twin shooter, where you navigate using the left stick and fire with the right stick. The big quirk with Flame Over's controls is that the right stick is also used to control the camera, which you'll need to do regularly. So when you're holding a trigger button and using the right stick you'll fire your flame fighting water and foam, but if you're not holding a trigger button it will rotate the camera. It's definitely a bit awkward at first, but you'll get it down fairly quickly.
The real joy of playing Flame Over comes from the slow but steady improvement you notice in your runs.The first time you advance from The Office floors to the Executive Floors will feel like a major accomplishment. The difficulty curve in the game is spot on and the slow but meaningful upgrade system is implemented perfectly. The game completely nails what it means to be a roguelike. At the start the game, success feels almost impossible. But with the right amount of practice, patience, learning the ins and outs of the game, and just a little bit of luck, victory is quite attainable. The procedurally generated levels make it so that each playthrough feels fresh, even if you are just putting out fire after fire.
Everything is put together so well in Flame Over, but I do have a couple qualms about the game. The big one is simply that the game doesn't do enough in the beginning to educate you how to play. It does teach you some of the basics and also flashes tips across the loading screens, but it doesn't do enough for you to have a full understanding of the game. For example, each floor has an red button you can push that seemingly does nothing. In fact, it shuts off the electricity to the floor and is vital to preventing the fires from spreading, but I had no idea until I looked it up.
The smaller issue with the game is the fire axe. You are equipped with an axe to break down certain doors, but the axe will sometimes break seemingly at random. There is no axe meter so you have no idea when you're axe is on the verge of breaking. There are new axes available to pick up around some floors, but not every floor has a new axe available. So if your axe breaks on a floor without a replacement, you are 100% stuck if there are any other doors that need to be broken down. In a game that is otherwise punishing but fair, this is the one aspect of the game that is entirely unfair and feels completely out of place.
Those two critiques aside, Flame Over is an absolute blast to play. It's creative, challenging, and addictive. It progresses at the perfect pace so players won't fly through it and they also won't rage quit in frustration either. Roguelikes have been gaining a lot of popularity lately, and Flame Over is one of the best in recent memory.
4.5/5
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