The ending sucks. The ending is rushed and feels like a total different game. The game ends poorly and it is anticlimatic. But the rest is AMAZING. This is probably THE BEST rpg ever. It mixes the old school feeling of those Infinity Engine rpg, but with a FPS camera and Source engine. You really feel your choices and consequences of your actions. It is a masterpiece, buy it.
First of all I want to praise the art, graphics and overall presentation of the game. It is immersive, captivating and for the most part of the play-through I felt like there was no world outside the display I was looking at. The music and the sound effects are excellent too. But then nothing more can be said. The game is short, really a bunch of hours, it took me less than an afternoon to get to end. I thought that a second run could have been nice, since during the game many multiple choices are offered to the player. But instead I discovered that most of the choices are fake and you end up doing the same things and getting the same results no matter what. I am really disappointed by this game: Firewatche played exactly like those novels you read on holiday that take 700 pages to build up a far-fetched and rushed ending.
There was a time in game history, at the beginning of the years '00, when a gamer had to choose side: AMD vs Intel, ATI vs nVidia, Quake vs Unreal, Doom3 vs HalfLife2. Then, at least for what concerns me, came Far Cry. Far Cry hit the stores before HalfLife2 and Doom3 (which were the "next gen FPS" of the time). Nobody was expecting a game like this. Amazing graphic, sandbox gameplay, fast paced shooting, stealth mode, vehicles. This is one of my top 10 FPS of all time and it is the one that really showed me what kind of depth a "mindless shooter" can achieve. True, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever came before and they honestly broke the barrier of their genre. But this... It was like a world opened in front of my eyes. Every mission was screaming "freedom". The sequels and the pseudo sequels (Crysis) are just a linear consequence of this one. Games like this are one of a kind, it's like the first Gothic: they come and they change the way you see at a genre. You HAVE to play this.
