The Finals Review in Progress

If there’s one genre that lends itself to boom or bust, it’s the online shooter. For every success like Call of Duty, Halo, or Apex Legends, it seems like there are at least a dozen other games that have come and gone with barely a spark before they fizzle. With so many good competitive shooters in play, what makes one stand out? What makes it worth diverting your time to in versus another? After my first night of matches in The Finals, I think I’m starting to get a picture for how it answers those questions.

If The Running Man were about 3v3v3 gun battles, it would’ve resembled The Finals. The vibrant color palette combines with a pair of live sports-style play-by-play announcers to give it that over-the-top, American Gladiators feel that people in the ‘80s thought was going to be the future of sports. It strikes a great balance of not taking itself too seriously without making it a joke or becoming obnoxious.

There are two core “modes” to start with. Quick Cash has each team vying to collect a vault of coins and deposit it at a designated point on the map, which tends to result in a convergence of all of the three-person squads at those points. This is really effective for keeping the action moving, and because taking over the deposit doesn’t reset its progress, rounds move at a steady pace and avoid momentum-killing stalemates altogether.

Bank It focuses a bit more on direct PvP battles, but they tend to be more scattered. Here, each player carries coins in their virtual pockets, coming from vaults around the map or eliminating enemies. The on-the-fly strategizing of going for kills one second to needing to deposit before it all goes to waste is exciting, and it’s pretty fun to eliminate someone at the bank and deposit all their coins yourself.

You can choose from three different weight classes for your character, and they all play very differently from each other. The Light build, for example, focuses on mobility, trading stopping power for a grappling hook to quickly get to high or far places. The Heavy, meanwhile, could have been taken straight from Rainbow Six: Siege, as it alternates between controlling the battlefield with heavy weapons and smashing through walls like the Juggernaut.

That destructibility is the real star of The Finals, from what I’ve played so far. Sure, you can enter a room from the door or window. But taking the less obvious path of crashing right through the ceiling is a thrilling way to get the drop on unsuspecting teams, and you haven’t really played The Finals until you’ve stolen the vault by blowing a hole in the ceiling and have it drop right in front of you. By the end of tense matches the battlefield is littered with debris from entire buildings beginning to collapse.

Matchmaking as a solo player is quick and easy, but it does have one glaring weakness. In matches where I either didn’t match into a full three-person team, or we lost someone, no one was ever pulled into our team to refill our ranks. It’s very disheartening to be in a match by yourself, knowing you have no shot to win and no reason to hold out hope that help is going to arrive.

One night in, I’m intrigued. The game show-meets-squad shooter vibe is working well for me, and the pace of the action is exciting. The way flying through the battlefield on a grappling hook or hulk-smashing through buildings mixes with the strict objective based gameplay feels novel, though how long that lasts with just two game types remains to be seen. What I do know is that I’m eager to keep playing, which is all I can ask for this early on.

Stay tuned for the full review after I’ve put in some more hours, and if you’re playing let us know what you think in the comments.