Interesting but feels unfinished
Firegirl is a game where you have mainly two objectives. Extinguish fires to and mostly find survivors that are usually trapped in the building. If you miss just one survivor, the mission is deemed a failure = no reward money. You get a heads-up before every mission how many survivors there are in the maze of a building. No return to previous areas once you pass through a door with a fire icon. The game is very coy with explaining you things, you have to learn on the fly. Seeing an exit, doesn't mean I can't continue searching the building (especially in the forest area that wasn't clear). To keep things balanced you can upgrade the headquarters, your gear etc.. Overall the game suffers from a small scope: only a handful enemies and four different kinds of stages. Most of them lack true variety or interactive challenges. The random level design can also be very punishing with your water reserves, only with upgrades does the game get exponentially easier.
I really liked the look of the game, reminded me a lot of the theatrical presentation of Mystical Ninja 2 (N64) or Viewtiful Joe but in a beautiful sprite costume (wished the boss was done in that style too) The soundtrack consists of only a few tracks but they are very catchy and feel like something from the early PSX/N64 era.
From the gameplay it reminded me a little bit of Luigi's Mansion dressed in a rogue like package. Whereas Luigi's mansion had a creative puzzle component to lure out ghosts first before you catch them. Firegirl misses an additional hook for the gameplay. I wished there were more creative ways to deal with the fires like detect gas leaks that keeps feeding the fire or solve puzzles to find survivors. It is unfortunately a bit one dimensional and although I had a lot of fun in the beginning, the lack of new ideas makes the game lose steam pretty quickly. I truly hope there will be a sequel with more fleshed out ideas & levels because on paper this has the spirit of classic Nintendo games.