The Finals Review
Embark Studios, 2023
PvP FPS, Rated T
I've never really been into first person shooters. It has always seemed to me like it is way too competitive to get into with fanbases way too toxic to even pretend to let newbies try out the game properly. With a few exceptions, I've always just preferred to watch other more skilled people play them. However, when I saw that Embark Studios, a team made up of former EA DICE employees who developed games like Battlefield, and one of my personal favorite series Mirrors Edge were making a competitive shooter based on Crackdown-inspired environmental destruction, I couldn't help but at least put this on my radar. After getting together a group of friends from Eastern Illinois to enthusiastically play this with me, I can conclude that The Finals was a great place for me to start playing these sorts of competitive shooters.
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| Pre-release trailer for The Finals |
Story Setup
Story:
There isn't too much of a story here, but what is clear in-game is that The Finals is a fictional gameshow taking place at an undisclosed time in the future. It is accessed through VR by essentially anyone who wants to take part, and takes place in representations of real life locales. I feel the story isn't too much of a focus in the game, as exclusively PvP shooters are not exactly known for having excellent in-depth stories with lots of lore. I maybe would've liked to see a short career though that goes into some aspects of The Finals that aren't exactly clear in the game that we have here.
Characters:
Since there isn't much of a story, that also means that there isn't much in characters in The Finals. The only recurring characters that appear are the two announcers, Scotty and June. As the only two characters that appear match to match, I find these two very annoying. They are gameshow hosts, and I realize its there job to talk, but their incessant talking, and terrible puns they spew out whenever a team or player is wiped out gets very grating at times, and takes me out of the action at the worst possible times.
There are also the multiple nameless classes of characters that players pick to engage in this gameshow. To be honest though, with all the hero-shooters nowadays that all compete to have the most stylized and likeable characters such as Overwatch or Valorant, I feel most people are turned off by those vain attempts to appeal to players in these borderline cutesy ways. For me though, I honestly welcome the absence of character in these characters whom you control. It really drives home the point that these people are just pawns to be used for the express purpose of advertising The Finals as a gameshow.
Presentation
Graphics:
As somebody who enjoys the art style of Mirror's Edge greatly, The Finals strikes a lot of that same itch that I feel we don't get enough of in games. The buildings covered in a blinding white makes the environment feel cold and sterile, while also simultaneously making everything else in the environment with any sort of color pop. This helps in both giving the game a distinctive art style, but also in terms of readability while playing the game. I never found myself in a situation where I couldn't see another player because of where they were positioned relative to the environment (unless they were inside a smokescreen of course). I feel that's what made this game fairly easy for me to jump into compared to other shooters on the market.
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| Environments in The Finals |
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In terms of performance, this game also runs remarkably well on PC, which is where I played it. I was playing it on a machine with a 4080 Super GPU at max settings, which means it would've ran well regardless. However, my friends who I was playing with were running it on considerably less powerful PCs, and at max setting it was still reaching far above playable framerates. Even though this game looks fairly realistic in some aspects of its art style, I'm glad that the developers chose to not sacrifice performance for graphics that may look cutting edge.
Audio:
Sound design in first persons shooters is typically excellent, with players being able to detect gunfire or an explosion from any part of the map wherever you are standing. Its very impressive and The Finals is no different in this aspect. With the development team's experience working with games like Battlefield, a series all about immersing you into various war-torn landscapes, The Finals does a remarkable job in creating a rich soundscape where there is not only stuff happening even in the quietest of moments, but is also distinguishable whenever the action ramps up. This applies not only to battles but also to the UI as well. There are sound effects for specific things, which the game doesn't tell you explicitly what each sound means, but as you start to play the game more and more, you start to understand what each sound means. For example, a buzzer will sound off whenever an entire team is eliminated, and I ended up figuring that out for myself, and not because the game told me about it.
There is one aspect of the audio however that I would bring up, as it is the subject of controversy surrounding this game. It relates back to the two announcers, Scotty and June, who are in large part voiced by an AI. However, its not generated from nothing. Embark still hired two voice actors to record lines, and then used voice data from those recordings to synthesize more line, which neither of the voice actors recorded themselves. Embark claim it to help make the matches feel more dynamic, with lines for specific situations popping up whenever a certain amount of events happens. From my experience however, the quantity of voice lines that I've encountered doesn't seem like anything a professional voice actor couldn't handle. It is just a very odd choice they made in that, and for the sake of the actors, I wish they'd have gotten the chance to put their real voices in the game, as opposed to synthesized recreations of their voices.
Gameplay
Fun Factor:
The fun derived from this game is largely dependent on two things - the class of character you choose to play, and the game mode you choose. Starting off with character classes, there are 3 in The Finals. The Light class is the smallest and fastest of the three classes, hard to hit and able to use abilities centered on zipping around the environment and giving foes the slip. The Medium class is the neutral class with skills focused on healing and support, while used weapons that dish of a decent amount of damage. The Heavy is the slowest and strongest of the three, uses the largest weapons, and has abilities focused on defense, and destroying the environment. Depending on what class you pick, you could approach this game in many different ways, and tweak each class to make sure you are a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield (no pun intended). I personally found myself leaning towards the Light class, because I am a big fan of moving fast, and being stealthy.
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| Stealing a cash-out point in The Finals |
The second mode I tried revolved around two teams of 5 standing on a giant platform to guide it to their end of the map, while making sure the other team doesn't get the chance to stand on the platform. It is essentially a drawn out game of tug-of-war, and I didn't get much enjoyment from this mode. In the games I played, it felt like the game is decided in the first couple minutes of the match, and it wasn't very fun to have bigger teams compared to the other modes.
The final mode I tried centered around four teams of 3 finding vaults around the map containing coins. The goal is to collect as many coins as possible to deposit and build up as much money as possible throughout the match, the catch being that the more coins you hold, the easier it is for other people on the map to see you, kill you, and take your coins for themselves. Even though the main cash-out mode was fun, I found this to be the closest of the three I tried to a normal deathmatch mode, and I found it the most fun. As fun as it is to work as a team, this mode gives you the flexibility to go off by yourself if you want, which was a welcome change of pace.
Learning Curve:
In most other first person shooters, I find the learning curve to be very steep, as I feel most of these games have communities that have all played these games for a long time, thus most players are WAY better than any newbies could be. Since The Finals is still a fairly new game, I felt that this game was a little more welcoming with its difficulty. There certainly are moments that feel very hard, but its situations like these that you naturally learn how to navigate as you play the game more. There are also lots of different gadgets and weapons that you can unlock for each class that might be more your style, and make playing the game more comfortable.
Controls:
I chose to play this game on PC since I have a history of not enjoying first person shooter games on consoles, solely because of the controller. I like that playing with a keyboard and mouse gives me the ability to react to any threat from any direction so long as my hands are fast enough to react. On PC however, controlling first person shooters is still an issue because some actions require that you take your left hand off of one of the WASD keys to use an ability of something. If I didn't have a mouse with side buttons that I could easily remap these buttons to, I think I would be way harsher on the controls, since I can imagine how infuriating it must be to die because you took your fingers off of your ability to move for even just a split second.
Level Design:
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| Destruction potential in The Finals (footage from Skill-Up) |
Level design is THE THING that sold me on this game, as I'm sure it did many other people. Because of new server based technology Embark have developed, as opposed to client based, Embark are able to simulate some exceedingly impressive destruction for level geometry in real time for all players at the same time. This allows for massive changes to how you approach level design. In the cash-out mode for example, the level destruction can be used to your advantage in so many ways. You can crumble the entire ceiling on top of a cash-out point to make it harder to access for everybody, but easier to defend once you've started the cash-out process. If the cash-out point is above you, you could shoot the ceiling and have it fall down right into your lap instead of wasting precious time trying to find your way up to it. You could also completely destroy entire bridges or access points for other players. Once this sort of level design is experienced, its hard to imagine playing first person shooters without this sort of innovative destruction.
Conclusion
Changes:
Most of the changes I would make revolve around the controversy surrounding the AI voices, and using actual voice talent instead of relying on synthetic voices. I feel it is detrimental for the industry if we start relying on anything not human to create art. It takes the soul out of game making, which is what makes games special. Even if the announcer's voices were entirely human though, it wouldn't stop the fact that they talk too much, and completely break the flow of a match with their nonstop yammering.
Recommendation:
I can't think of a whole ton of major criticisms when playing this game. I expected I would have fun, but taking into account the addicting nature of the gameplay, I already know that I will be booting this up for the foreseeable future to get a taste of the amazing destruction, great feeling gunplay, and satisfying gameplay customization. This was a blast, and I'm excited to keep playing it!
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