The Finals: First Impressions
The Finals! A hot new freemium/Battle Pass game from Embark Studios, makers of…..(looks it up)….ARC Raiders and wim (literally what it’s called). Never heard of them. However, I’ve heard of The Finals. I’ve been watching it on Twitch since it was in pre-release. Then, I finally played it. This is a first impression and not a review so I won’t give it a score. Whatever. Let’s talk about it.
Forget the Big O. Embrace the Big E.
So here’s the point of The Finals: it’s basically a heist game meets team deathmatch. You play in teams, or, in a new mode, solo, and try and collect as many coins as you can. You get coins by killing players and looting vaults that randomly spawn. Then you have to find a deposit box to deposit those coins. These deposit boxes spawn for a few minutes and disappear, and along with the vaults, act as temporary chokepoints throughout the map. The team/player that deposits the necessary amount of coins first wins. It’s a neat concept and relatively well executed.
The gameplay of the The Finals is pretty strong, but also somewhat scattered and skeletal. There’s the foundation of a strong gameplay loop here, from the gunplay, to the grenades, to the more random items like jump pads and health cannons. It could be really good with a little refinement. At the moment though, it can feel a little all over the place, like someone took Fortnite and Call of Duty and threw them in a blender.
The guns feel more realistic than good, with recoil making it tough to hit targets with any sort of refinable precision. The guns do look cool and sound nice and they are all different enough to anchor different playstyles. The LMG has a huge magazine, allowing you to shoot forever, but it’s slower than other weapons and takes a second to reload. The starting submachine gun is fast as hell, but requires precision to kill your opponent before having to reload. The assault rifle is a good mix of the two, with speed and a sizable clip. The revolver is really cool, though it’s efficacy is still under review.
Every ridden a zip line in Vegas with a machine gun?
To be frank, I don’t love the button layout. The main issue is that you have like 4 different accessories and to access them you have to use a wheel, which is problematic. One, it takes up the middle of the screen, two, the actual button press is convoluted. You have to press one button to open the wheel and then another to actually select the item, the whole time using the camera to aim. It’s a hassle to use in a firefight and you’re better off using it in an anticipatory fashion. I have maybe killed one person using grenades as intended, but there have been many times I have chucked grenades around a corner because, hey, why not?
The maps are actually pretty awesome. The designs feels very organic because the game doesn’t feel the need to include the artificial chokepoints other multiplayer FPS games thrive on. I also liked the verticality and mix of open and tight spaces. There’s ziplines and you can climb on like everything. The environments are destructible too, which contributes to the mayhem already going on. The movement in this game is excellent and that owes a lot to the map design. The aesthetics within the maps are excellently done and each environment feels unique but also part of a bigger picture.
What a scenic location. Would be shame if someone where to….blow it up.
Should you be playing The Finals now? Probably not exclusively. It’s far from the best game on the market, hell, it’s far from the best freemium FPS on the market. But it’s on the come up, and if you’re a game you should know about it. It could be very important in a year or two. Or it could fade into obscurity and die. Ultimately that’s in the hands of Embark games, makers of classics such as ARC Raiders and wim.
Overall, The Finals is an exciting new FPS multiplayer game that does indeed have some potential. It’s got some issues too. But it really does have potential. It remind me a lot of the early Travis Scott era, before Days Before Rodeo, when the substance wasn’t really there (some would say it’s still not), but the aesthetic was. And The Finals is tremendously aesthetic. Everything looks good and feels coherent. It’s just like a baby crab inside a massive shell. It’s got to grow a little bit, fill up the inside to match it’s gaudy, shiny exterior.
