If you’ve played a Battlefield game any time recently, you’re probably aware of the environmental destruction in them. It’s an aspect of the shooter genre the Battlefield franchise has decided to hone in on more than its competitors, and as a result, it has become one of the reasons why you might want to play Battlefield over, say, Call of Duty. But for some of the developers at DICE, it never went far enough in Battlefield, and so they left, formed their own studio, Embark Studios, and made a game that really goes all in on destructive environments: the first-person shooter The Finals, developed and published by Embark Studios.
The Finals is a PVP shooter in which you compete in teams of three to gather as much money as possible. How many teams are competing and how you receive the money depends on the game mode, of which there are three. The main mode, which also comes with a ranked version, is Tournament. It starts with a bracket of eight teams, split up into two different groups. You play a match with four of those teams, and the bottom two get eliminated, while the top two go on to the next round, where they meet the top two of the other side of the bracket for another match with four teams. Once again, the bottom two get disqualified, while the top two go on to have a one-on-one rematch in… the finals, winner takes all.
The ranking of the teams is based on how much money they have, and there are two primary ways to get money. The first one is very simple. You get money if you kill an enemy, and you lose money if you get killed. The second one is more interesting because, no matter how many enemies you kill, you probably won’t win without cashing in at least one of the vaults. At the beginning of The Finals, two money vaults are spawned across the map, which have to be collected and brought to the designated cash-in spots. Once that’s done, your team has to defend the cash until the little timer runs out and the money has been delegated to your team’s bank account. So one team will be defending the cash-in while other teams try to break through their barricade and reallocate the money into their own pockets.
This creates an extremely hectic game state since there are clear control points players will fight over in an attempt to cash in that vault for their own team. It’s not uncommon for more than just two teams to fight over the same control point as well, turning the whole thing into a chaotic shootout with quick movement, a rather high time to kill, and little to no cover since the enemy can approach from every direction. Even from above and beneath, enemies might attack, as verticality is a big thing, especially coupled with the entirely destructible environments.
This was one of the big promises The Finals was announced with. If you want a game where you could destroy every centimeter of the environment, then The Finals would be for you. And The Finals does deliver on that promise… somewhat. So it is true that you can destroy absolutely everything in your path—every staircase, every wall, every floor, and every ceiling—but you can only really do that theory. Because the big problem I have with the environmental destruction in this game is that there are very few means to actually destroy anything.
There are three classes: light, medium, and heavy, which all come with their own weaponry and gadgets. If you play light or medium, don’t even think about wanting to wreak havoc in the ways you might have imagined yourself doing when the game was first announced. Both classes have no meaningful way to destroy anything except a C4 charge that you probably won’t even use because there are better alternatives in your loadout. If your goal in playing The Finals is to become an angel of destruction that wreaks havoc across the map, you’re basically locked into playing the heavy, as this is the only one that’s given the ability to have a real impact on the concrete structures around you. Run through walls like your Juggernaut, shoot a rocket launcher at the ceiling to drop the enemy on your level, and… use a C4 charge? Yes, even the heavy build has only these few tools to tear down the walls around you. So if you’re here for the destructability of it all, the TLDR is: yes, if you have the tools in your loadout to destroy things, then you can indeed destroy all of the things, but most of the time you won’t even have access to any of that. And speaking of the available equipment, The Finals has some serious balancing issues at the moment that take out some of the fun. When you give me a list of weapons and gadgets to unlock and play around with, I want the ability to create my own way of playing and a build that accommodates that, but in reality, you figure out pretty quickly what’s by far the strongest and just go with that. And it’s not just me and my friends either; you start to run into the same kind of loadouts very quickly.
As I mentioned before, the maps are built around vertical play, with basically any building having at least three stories, and most maps have some sort of floating platforms on them. In addition to that, there are ziplines and bounce pads everywhere, and depending on the class you play, you might even have access to a grapple hook. This emphasis on verticality in the map design makes a lot of sense when its destructability is your guiding design philosophy. It’s not uncommon that a fight over a vault will start on the highest level of a building and end on the ground.
In general, The Finals looks rather nice, if a bit generic. Outside of the bold uses of yellow that mark the maps, nothing about it particularly stands out visually. I will give them credit for the random weather conditions that come at the start of every round; some are mostly visual, like rain, but some can actually have a big impact on the round, like the sandstorm that transforms the map into a desert. Just in terms of graphic fidelity, it’s quite good though, especially considering it seems to be optimized very well for PC. There are some advertisements for fictional products spread around the arena, as well as a ring of spectators floating above the map. After all, in-universe, this is supposed to be a real tournament people watch for entertainment, like an esport of sorts. With that come special events that might activate during a round, like anti-gravity or, I don’t know, ALIENS.
What tops off the spectator sport stylization are the announcers that mimic classic sports announcers. And here we have to address the elephant in the room that puts a damper on the whole thing. Embark Studios has decided to use AI voice acting for any and all voices in the game (but the announcers are the only real voices present anyway). I understand the reason for that is wanting a high amount of different sentences they could say to any situation possible within a match, but that’s perfectly doable with real voice actors. You might just have to pay a little more. Using AI voices is just inexcusable and a practice that absolutely cannot become commonplace in this industry, no matter what.
While the AI voices absolutely put a damper on the whole experience, I also can’t lie and say I didn’t have a good time playing The Finals, although I still really wish they’d reconsider this decision. When it comes to long-term relevancy, I’m not too sure The Finals will survive all that long. It’s fun, but it also doesn’t do anything all that unique, and with about a dozen new PVP shooters on the horizon that all feature basically the same art style, you do have to wonder if The Finals will really be able to stand up against all those and come out as the winner, or if one of them iterates on a similar gameplay loop in a more interesting way and snatches the trophy right out of their hands.
Nairon played The Finals on PC with his own copy.
