Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?
Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.
Gameplay
The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.
Gamemodes
Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.
In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.
Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.
What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?
Traversal
The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.
Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.
One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.
The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.
Loadouts
Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.
I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.
Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.
Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.
Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.
Overall Thoughts
The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?
Not really.
I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.
Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.
Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.
It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.
Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.