I really thought I would like this game, it had all the elements:
- Catchy graphics and visuals
- (not so) Great shooting
- Fascinating twist (hugely destructible environment)

And yet, it feels, underwhelming.

The most fun I've had since S3 of Fortnite, but holy hell does it need better weekly updates. With seasons that last a very long time (3 months), a consistent flow of impactful updates is needed to keep the game fresh, yet all we get from Embark are new cosmetics and community challenges that barely scrape the surface. On top of that, longstanding issues such as Light class being competitively unviable, matchmaking being fucked and voice chat not working correctly have gone completely unaddressed. I want this game to succeed, I really do, but it's become clear that Embark doesn't know how to handle a live service model. I pray that something changes soon and that The Finals doesn't end up as yet another failed multiplayer project.

I'd like to preface that I've been playing this game long before it's actual release in December, I participated in the second Closed Beta test and the Open Beta test, so my hours are more in the 200+ range, so I have some experience with the game. I'll start off with the positives.

>Pros
-It's definitely, without a doubt, the most free to play game on the market right now. No P2W, no grindskip (save for the Battlepass I guess), no advantages can be gained by paying money. All the unlockable equipment and weaponry can ONLY be acquired by playing the game. The premium currency allows you to purchase cosmetic options and that's it, the cosmetic themselves don't offer unfair advantaged either.
-The satisfying destruction. Embark studios is made up of mostly ex-DICE devs, brought to fame from the Battlefield games which featured some of the most incredible and detailed large and small scale destruction, all of that on 64 player servers no less. And it's no different here, quite literally everything is destructible. Walls, floors, ceilings, entire buildings, construction cranes, everything. If there's no door, you make one. Want an open space office? Demolish a few walls with C4 or with a sledgehammer. An enemy is hiding on top of a crane? Blast it with an RPG or breaching charges and watch that little bastard fall to his doom. Or better yet, use the wrecking ball on the crane to bring down an entire hotel. It's incredible what you can do in this game, and it's all unscripted and playermade. Sacrificing only your CPU performance though....
-The music is really sublime. DESTROYER lives in my head rent free and the new CNS tracks are no joke either, although they lack the "The Finals" leitmotif, but otherwise, solid tracks especially if you enjoy 8-bit and synth music. The music really sets in the tone of a Running Man-esque blood sport taking place in a surreal cyberspace of the far off future.
-The shooting is refreshing. Modern FPS tend to fall more and more into the short TTK (Time To Kill) line of though, where a shootout is predetermined by preaiming a corner and then instantly dying. The Finals instead has a bit longer TTK, allowing for some retaliation and strategy to be necessary to come out on top. I'll talk more in depth about the weapon roster later on.
-The Movement. Some might disagree but I think The Finals strikes the perfect balance for me between a twitchy movement shooter and a more grounded shooter. It allows for some neat movement combos like Zipline into catapult jump pad or window hopping and it's overall simple to understand and pull of, albeit slightly floaty but I don't mind it. It also doesn't favor slide cancels or other annoyances of other modern multiplayer FPS games either.
-The concept itself. The vibe you get out of the game is easily my favorite aspect of the game. It feels surreal and fantastic, with these fake sponsors and cheesy AI announcers, it's rather charming.
-The innovations. This game definitely pushes the boundaries of modern shooters. There are many interesting systems that all click together and interact with each other. The gravity gun esque interact button that allows you to chuck almost any prop in the game, with sometimes lethal results. Killing an enemy with a potted plant has never felt so good. The canisters/barrels filled with all sorts of hazards add so many new venues for destruction and murder. You can round up all the gas canisters in the area on your cashout and let the poison gas deter any attackers, or use the high velocity exploding red canisters to bring down a suspended structure so you can fight for the money in the rubble. These systems all feel fun to use and interact with, only gripe is that sometimes they can behave in unexpected ways, so many people usually don't bother with them too much, which I think it's a shame.
-GOO. If you've ever played Prey 2017, you must have had the thought at least once or twice of "Man, immagine a multiplayer game with a GOO gun!" and, finally, yours (and mine) answers have been answered. GOO comes in throwable canisters form, grenade and gun form. Shape the battlefield in any way YOU want it to be. Need a door blocked off? Shoot a few globs on the doorway and now nobody can pass without making a ruckus. Need an instant wall? Use a GOO grenade or canister for an instant 2x5 wall that keeps bullets and enemies out of sight. Stairway's out? GOO yourself a new platforming challenge. Enemy's trying to run away from your righteous fury? Shoot him with GOO to lock him in place for a couple of seconds, securing the kill. The possibilities are incredible

But now is time for the
>Cons
-Horrid Tutorial. Now, I've been playing even before official release, so I didn't need the tutorial (let alone the fact that there wasn't one in the betas), but by god does the default tutorial suck. It gives new players NO information about the game or it's systems. It just says "Press E on shiny box. Wait 10 seconds. Grab box with F and now put tiny box in big box. Wait 20 seconds and shoot a few dummies. Press E to revive. Congratulations!". It doesn't explain that you can grab teammate revive statues to bring them to safer spots, it doesn't teach you anything about the Gas-Fire-Smoke synergies. It doesn't explain the destruction aspects of the game. It doesn't explain what Respawn Tokens are and why they're important. It just throws people out into the wilderness to learn the game by themselves, which can be frustrating. This might be a nitpick but new players might have been put off by this.
-The cheating problem. I'll get this one out of the way now, the game in Open Beta was FILLED with cheaters. Every lobby had at least 3 and if you made it to the final round, chances are the enemy team had a cheater. This was a serious issue and Embark did nothing to address this at launch. So cheaters were in game at launch which was not good. Thankfully, they mostly keep into OCE servers and a few on EU/US servers but you will see them. But recognizing them was hard because of....
-The reWASD fiasco. Now, The Finals is a multi platform game, it's available on Xbox Series X and PS5, so by default, it has controller support, even on PC. Now if you've been keeping up with modern multiplayer FPS games, you'll know what Aim Assist is and how it can easily be used to your advantage or straight up abused. Turns out that The Finals has some VERY aggressive AA at launch (accounting for 50% OF TOTAL AIM, according to Embark themselves) , so people started spoofing their mouse and keyboards as controllers through a program called reWASD. This effectively gave them the benefits of controller users in the form of AA with none of the downsides of using a controller. This meant that you were at a total disadvantage when fighting against a reWASD user since they effectively had removed aiming out of the equation and staying mobile and on point with MnK is much easier than on a controller. But what about recoil? Well, reWASD also allows for custom anti-recoil scripts to be loaded, so you could negate every weapon's downside by using reWASD with custom scripts for every weapon. This issue played the game for way too long, it took Embark A MONTH to finally take action and deploy countermeasures. Given the December release date, the vacation period was soon after, so any problems that would be found in-between December and early January, would not be addressed until mid January. This was one of the nails in The Finals' dwindling popularity. The other one was (and still is)
-The HORRIBLE Balancing. Basically speaking, a good 60 to 70% of the weapon and gadget roster is downright useless. The remaining is an absolute must pick if you want a chance to win a match, with some abilities and gadgets being VERY busted. One example that plagued the game and drove off thousands of people away from it was *Recon Senses. Essentially, it was wall hacks, but legit and built ingame. With no way to know if you were tracked (save for a very faint audio queue). This alone made almost every match A TOTAL SLOG. Everyone was running it and I mean everyone, you couldn't escape it. It was so busted that it was removed at the end of the season for being too OP. But the damage was done, the game had already lost something like 80% of it's playerbase because of this.
-Class Balance. This technically falls into the same category as before but I wanted to talk more indepth about the classes themselves and how they were simply not balanced. For starters, the Light. The fast, hit and run character, with moderate DPS and a few gadgets to disrupt enemies and secure the kill. Lowest HP pool but fastest movement. In practice, it's a throw pick class. It lacks a LOT of team oriented gadgets and relies too much on itself and with a game that requires tight coordination unless you wanna wait for a 30 second respawn timer, either you become a one man killing machine or you simply switch class to something more useful. Like the Heavy. The powerhouse, specializing in demolition and defense, you get the most braindead easy ways to do DPS at a consistently high rate. RPG, C4, Lewis gun, explosive mines, an insane array of shields, a fat HP pool and a slow jog instead of running, the heavy is decent teamplayer that can provide cover and firepower when needed. Then there's the medium which can literally do anything these 2 classes can do but better. Insta revives, insane mobility that renders the light obsolete, 2 of the strongest specs (Healbeam and Recon), the single highest DPS of any class paired with the single best weapons of the whole game (FCAR and AKM). It's the jack of all trades and during Season 1, it basically was the only class everyone was playing. Triple medium stacks were very common.
-The Maps. Anything after Skyway Stadium is garbage, Vegas sucks by virtue of having a total lack of cover in the street areas and having some of the worst map variants available (one being so bad it was removed) and SYS$Horizon being simply a mess with NO unique variants. Seoul just needs a revamped green bridge/hospital area and Monaco needs to remove the Duck and Cover variant. But overall, the maps leave a lot to be desired.
-Map Events. They suck and do NOTHING to spice up the game. Hell, I forget they happen half of the time.
-Lack of game modes. Embark shipped the game with THREE game modes and it stayed that way until Season 2 (i'm not counting the limited time modes as different game modes, since they were all "Bank it! But worse!" or "Tourney! But Worse!". We finally got Power Shift in Season 2 which is a nice change (albeit a bit unbalanced) but then they went ahead and removed unranked Tournament from the pool. Tournament is THE DEFINITIVE gamemode of The Finals. It encapsulates everything about the game and it's feel. But now you can only access it through the Ranked version. I like to ladder rank but if I wanna try out a silly build or play with low elo friends, I don't want to put them through the metaslave hell that is ranked.
-Melee. It's an FPS with melee and that usually has it's caveats. This time the caveat is that melee is ass. Sure some melee weapons have unique functions but like..... ehh?
-Cosmetics and customization in general. By god are the models and faces ugly. The customization options are plenty.... but rehashed. It's common to get a free version of a paid skin, it makes sense, it's much cheaper to change the color of a shoe rather than make a new shoe model alltogether. But some of these cosmetics, even the paid ones, are just..... ehh.. I can't put my finger on it...
-MTX. This game has em and, while they are completley avoidable, they are OUTRAGEOUSLY priced. 8 Bucks for a rolex. 15 Bucks for a skin set and a sticker. 20 for an animated skin with animated weapon skin. 4 bucks for an animation set for the AKM. 5 bucks for a goddamn spoon reskin of the sledgehammer. You get my point. But the scummy thing they do is the usual "currency bundle" thing. Now they sell premium currency bundles with the usual F2P bullshit bundling. If you've ever seen how mobile games do it, it's the same story. A skin you want might cost 600 credits but the lowest credit purchase you can do is for 500 credits for 5 bucks. So you need to shill out for the 10 dollar credit bundle that conveniently comes with a whopping 10% extra credits! What a steal! Literally! I get that it's a completely free game from every other aspect, but don't go asking for CoD skins levels of money when the quality just isn't the same.
-Lack of marketing. Embark put their eggs all in one basket by thinking that the game would become popular simply by word of mouth and with a release bomb during the game awards. It worked, but not for long. It was top 5 most played on steam for it's release week but come January and the hype died down. What happened? Well, excluding all the previous issues with balancing and lack of content, the game simply wasn't widespread. Most people that know it, either know it because they took part in the Beta testing or more as a "Yeah, I heard of it but that's about it". Twitch streamers never latched onto this game as they did with, say, Apex Legends or Valorant, and when the heavens itself plopped this game into their laps as a new competitive game (for as much as Embark wants to push it atleast, the game is casual but they really really wanna push for competitive play, go figure), they simply ignored it or played it for a month and then dropped it. I'm happy that the twitch "crowd" never latched onto it, but as much as I hate to admit it, games nowdays NEED the streaming factor to survive and The Finals simply didn't. That's not to say it's doing badly, it's surely bringing in loads of dosh from all the people that bought the premium currency and whatnot. But a quick glance at it's player numbers don't bode well for it's future. Especially when a game like this really needs a lot more balancing patches and content.



All in all, I really enjoy The Finals, I really do, despite what my critical review might say about it. But I write this because I like the game and I want Embark to stop being lazy fucks and actually get to work instead of counting their money.

Um dos meus amigos disse que isto era o 'Tiktok dos Videojogos' e provavelmente é a melhor forma de o descrever, rondas hiper-rápidas (um lapso e já se foi metade da partida), ação constante, um sentimento vago de nunca ter a certeza do que se está a passar e muito, muito barulho. É incrível.

Todas as partidas começam em puro silêncio, literalmente o único momento de meditação disponível, desde o menu cheio de pop-ups e daily challenges até aos momentos finais de uma partida. Assim que a música corta e deixa só o som dos teus pés a bater no chão, tens cerca de 30 segundos para deixar a tua última célula cerebral processar qualquer tipo de pensamento para além 'disparar, correr, explodir'.

Genuinely think they found something totally new here with the objective capture/deliver gametypes and the destruction engine. The latter really makes things just the right amount of predictable, with the play space shifting around players' actions. There's a very good and satisfying to learn skill ceiling involved with figuring out how to best use that destruction to your advantage. At first it's a pretty spectacle and a fun toy, but soon it opens up into a way to take control of the environment. An enemy team is capturing an objective. Do you enter from their floor? Break through the ceiling and drop in from above? Maybe you destroy the floor beneath them, dropping the objective to the next floor down where you've already set up to take advantage of its new placement?

It's a hell of a lot of fun.