The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 7th

Can you reach today's door?

You could open today's door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that's a load-bearing pillar over there - may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what's behind today's door.

It's destructible first-person shooter The Finals! Released in December 2023, it was late enough in the year to remain eligible for 2024's advent calendar.

Graham: I assumed my years of multiplayer shooting were behind me. That's partly because I am now old and busy, but also because the modern form of the genre - namely rank-based matchmaking and battle pass unlocks - punishes my lack of time in a way older games, with their dedicated servers and smaller arsenals, did not.

Then I saw The Finals, and The Finals said," all the buildings can blow up", and suddenly I found the time. Here is a very particular "wouldn't it be cool if" made real. Wouldn't it be cool if a video game featured an entire city? Yes, take Grand Theft Auto and enjoy, my child. Wouldn't it be cool if you could blow distinct holes in every wall, ceiling and floor until an entire building collapsed, but also this had tactical significance within a multiplayer game? Yes, yes it would.

Even aside from this spectacularly destructive environment, The Finals understands that chasing, being chased, and escaping are fundamental thrills. In The Finals standard mode, multiple teams of three are fighting to grab a cash vault, carry it across the map, and deposit it in a machine that then takes a short while to secure the funds inside. It's the perfect setup, as players chase each other across rooftops, escape by exploding a hole in a wall, and then steal a cash vault by detonating the floor beneath it.

Modern shooter though it may be, both in its free-to-play battle pass and its arsenal of machineguns, The Finals also has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. Every fight is taking place within the framing device of a virtual reality game show, which only matters in as far as it allows them to introduce special events like meteor strikes or alien invasions. The Finals can be sweaty, as the kids say, with team work and class choices making a big impact on success during public matches, but it also feels playful and silly in a way that's resistant to some of the more toxic elements of a playerbase.

The Finals held my attention through much of December and then January of this year, but perhaps more surprisingly it has managed to draw me back in the months since with some of its seasonal updates. One of them took place in a map set during feudal Japan, and sure, I absolutely wanted to smash those to bits. The most recent season added a fun new map and a less competitive progression system, which was most welcome.

I have always been a generalist when it comes to playing games, but I often think of shooters as my de facto genre of choice. In that sense playing The Finals has felt like a joyful homecoming - even if it's ultimately blowing up that home one wall at a time.

Ollie: There’s a special joy that arises when backup plans work flawlessly in The Finals. Oh, your team jumped on mine and forced us off the vault with seconds to spare? It’d be a shame if we were to detonate the C4 we’ve placed all around the vault, forcing the entire thing to drop down a floor to the killbox we’ve set up underneath...

Edwin: I never managed to play much of this because it kept crashing my PC, but I did enjoy running over the roof of that big glass house in one of the launch maps. Also, shooting out the glass beneath people running over the roof of that big glass house in one of the launch maps.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!