The Finals review — The ultimate FPS gameshow

I grew up on first-person shooter games, but recently I was in a bit of a slump. Nothing appealed to my tastes of open maps, destructible environments, and plenty of gadgets for making plays. Then, The Finals came along. An objective-based FPS game by Embark Studios where almost everything the eye can see is destructible. The Finals singlehandedly re-sparked my love for first-person shooters, but it has its fair share of flaws, so let’s jump into how it works.

The objective of the main game mode, Quick Cash, is simple. You and your two teammates compete with two other teams to track down a small box called the vault, open it, grab the cash box, and throw it into the cashout. Each successful deposit is worth $10,000 and you need $20,000 to win. It sounds simple, but there’s a catch, all of this takes time. During the process of running to find the vault, opening it, bringing it to the cashout, then waiting for the timer to run out, there are plenty of opportunities for plays and steals. While all of this is going down, the announcers, Scotty and June, will be commentating on how the teams are performing, this is a gameshow after all.

At the same time, the pacing and balance for Quick Cash feel off. Remember, if you lose the cashout and it finishes counting down, the other team gets ALL of the money. This means the defenders essentially have to fend off two teams multiple times, and one minor mistake after a series of perfect plays costs you the cashout. It also actively encourages rat strats, where one team lets the other two whittle each other down and then springs in for the win. The game could really benefit if there were more ways to compound on a victory.

What about the locales where these battles go down? Well, there’s a handful of maps, all offering unique playspaces and map flows. Seoul, for example, is segmented into three parts, with a central tower. In comparison, Vegas has verticality, but it’s only a few stories high, with most of the fighting happening in compact chic casino layouts. Each arena can have a number of conditions such as having the cashout on a suspended platform, or maybe it’s under construction, so moveable cranes with wrecking balls are added to the map. There’s also weather and time of day, such as a night map, or a foggy map. On top of that, there are random events in the arena such as but not limited to: alien invasions, meteor showers, increased damage, and low gravity. All of the variation lends itself to massive replayability, no two matches will be exactly the same.

Let’s get into the three asymmetrical contestant archetypes, light, medium, and heavy, each of whom has their own weapons, abilities, and gadgets. As a few general rules, you have infinite ammo and your gadgets are based on a cooldown. Starting off with light, they’re fast and pack a punch, but their health is low compared to the others. There are a number of weapons and strategies that can one-shot the light, and any misplay leads to near-instant death. Lights have an invisibility cloak, an evasive dash ability (think Tracer from Overwatch), and a grappling hook, which I love to see in games. They have access to weapons like SMGs, a sawed-off shotgun, a sword, and both throwable and stabbin’ knives. While archetypes might share some gadgets, they usually have a good deal of ones to call their own. The light has vanishing bombs, which will make your teammates invisible, a stun gun that slows and disrupts an enemy when hit, and glitch grenades, which disable enemies’ equipment and prevent them from using gadgets or abilities. Overall, their main strengths are maneuverability, subterfuge, and ambush potential.

Moving on to the mediums, they’re a step down from the lights in terms of speed but a step up in terms of health, and they’re on another level entirely when it comes to utility. Their abilities include a healing beam (does what it says on the can), a guardian turret that’s genuinely competent and has a beefy health bar, and recon senses, basically a pulse of wall hacks. They have access to two assault rifles, a revolver, a lever-action shotgun, a grenade launcher, and a riot shield/baton combo. Their gadgets include gear like jump pads, which launch players in the direction it’s facing, APS turrets which destroy incoming projectiles, an assortment of landmines, and a defibrillator, which instantly revives and grants a whole two seconds of I-frames to the recipient. Mediums are support-focused, but they can sting hard as well. Even if their team dies, their constructs could still win them the game.

The third and final archetype is the heavy. The heavy. Is. Powerful. They might be slow, but they have over twice the health of lights. When it comes to abilities, heavies offer a front-facing shield with a ton of health (think Reinhardt from Overwatch), a goo-gun that fires little bits of flammable goo that can be used for cover or platforming, and the charge ‘n’ slam, which allows them to run through walls like they’re paper. Their arsenal includes an auto-shotgun that fires in 4-round bursts and has some of the highest DPS in the game, a Lewis gun, a flamethrower, and a sledgehammer that can destroy buildings. The gadgets they have access to are top-tier for both offense and defense. They have a bubble shield that can be shot out of but can’t be shot into, an RPG that one-shots lights on direct hits and takes a decent chunk out of mediums (and buildings), and plenty of mines and grenades. You cannot challenge a competent heavy in their domain, you have to conform to their rules, and their very presence is a threat. To put it simply, the heavies are gods of destruction, fortification, and pressure.

It’s important to mention that there are more weapons and gadgets than the ones I mentioned, and not every option is competitive. Lights have the largest selection at 9 weapons, and heavy and medium each have 6, but if you’re serious about winning, then that already shallow pool narrows down to a few standout weapons. For example, the lights throwing knives are ineffective at range and become inaccurate when jumping. Why even pick throwing knives instead of the sawed-off shotgun that can reliably two-shot enemies or a powerful SMG with decent range? This goes double when the throwing knives become ineffective while jumping, and mobility is one of light’s only saving graces. Why would mediums pick a clunky grenade launcher with a measly ammo count of four when they could use either of the powerful assault rifles they’re given? In the end, when you zero in on the most viable weapons, the arsenal shrinks down by a decent amount.

The classes all have their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s clear light falls behind. The heavy and medium both bring plenty to the table for team play, from the former’s shields to the latter’s healing and revives. Heavies can help move the cashout to a more desirable location through destruction and then fortify, and mediums can help set up defenses and sustain your team. Lights can kill… albeit really well when playing at higher skill levels, but for the most part, they offer very little in a group other than their glitch grenade. This lack of utility and team play makes the light feel dissonant to the core of the game. It’s apparent that Embark is aware of the problem, as they added those vanishing bombs to the game at release, which do offer something to the team, even if it is a tad underwhelming. But, at the end of the day, mediums can resurrect the dead, and heavies can capsize buildings, it’s hard for lights to compete with that.

The vast majority of the arena is destructible, leading to fun, chaos, and frustration. Running through a building that’s crumbling around you leads to cinematic moments comparable to Battlefields, “only in Battlefield” moments. Destruction also opens doors for strategy. Placing C4 or a breaching charge near the objective to blow it down a level can help attackers gain access to the cashout or help defenders shake enemies off of it. On the other hand, it can occasionally get frustrating when you get stuck in a deformed building, but those moments happen rarely, which is impressive given the sheer scale of the destruction. An issue you’re more likely to encounter is that sometimes there’s no way to reach an upper floor or suspended structure where the cashout is located because every way up has been destroyed. This leads to your team awkwardly prodding around the perimeter until either the cashout expires, or you funnel into a kill zone in an attempt to ascend. But, when you’re sprinting through a cathedral with the cash box in your hands as it all crashes to the ground, there’s nothing else like it.

There are also various forms of barrels littered around the map, each of which contains elements such as fire, poison gas, smoke, or goo. They can be thrown, rigged with explosives, or both. There are also explosive tanks that aren’t thrown like the rest, instead, they fire in a straight-ish line and explode. It’s important to mention that each of these types of barrel apply to a grenades that can be equipped as well depending on your class, and there are interactions between them. Starting off with goo, it expands to form a hard wall or a cluster, so it’s good for instant cover. Gas is the most powerful tool for keeping enemies off of the cashout and general zone control, but gas can be countered by fire which burns it away. Fire also spreads to goo and smoke puts out fire. Creative plays with any of these substances can change the course of the game, and there are plenty of barrels around. There are some flaws with the rock, paper, scissors style of gameplay in both classes and elements though. If your opponents have rock, and you don’t have paper, then good luck! Sometimes it will feel like you’re spinning your wheels with no progress.

At this point, you might be wondering about progression. Well, you can unlock new gear that relates to gameplay and cosmetics. You don’t start with all of the weapons, abilities, and gadgets, you have to earn them with VRs, which you get by playing matches. Cosmetics such as skins and weapon charms can be unlocked by leveling up individual gear through use. If you want anything really fancy, then you have to get them through the store or the battle pass with multibucks, the premium currency. Although, Embark does grant the occasional free goodies and The Finals is completely free to play, so I would say they’re rather generous. Then again, the battlepass expires, and there’s absolutely no reason for gating off cosmetics players paid for other than cheap FOMO tactics that hurt the video game industry.

Moving on to the sound design of The Finals: it’s excellent. When a game has this many moving parts, it’s important that everything has a distinct sound to it. From the crack of a sniper rifle to the whizzing of an explosive tank, everything has a clear audio signature. On top of that, the music slaps. The synthwave soundtrack can hype games up, both when preparing in a lobby, and especially in the final moments of a match when everyone is scrambling for the cashout.

Overall, The Finals is a unique take on the FPS genre, throwing together a handful of tried and true gameplay ingredients in a fresh new way. While the game struggles with balancing its weapons, classes, and chaos, it’s these elements that make the game special. The destruction is on a massive scale, the classes offer good variation in play style, the dynamic structure of the arenas means plenty of replayability and strategy, and it all combines into a game that gives players amazing playmaking potential. The Finals is a game with bombastic fun engraved in its core, and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Unless otherwise stated, the product in this article was provided for review purposes.