The Finals Open Beta Hands On

After all this writing, I get to write some more! Well, at least after playing a game!

This past Friday for MajorPlays, @kevikev, @merge_conflict, and I sat down to try the hottest new game sweeping the “not yet done” scene, The Finals! This game is made by Embark Studios (Lawd, I tagged everything as Embark GAMES).

The Finals is just a simple first person shooter that just so happens to be a game show. I know that sounds familiar (in so many ways). However, in this one, its about how capitalism did what it did and now contestants kill each other to get fat stacks! We might be out of the doom and gloom of the apocalypse and into the late stage capitalist dystopia arc.

One thing you’ll get off the bat is that while the premise of the game might be every crypto bro and venture capitalists wet dream, for everyone else that it will suck for, they make it look pretty. Everything about this game is bright and colorful. It’s like it’s weaponizing your ADHD to say “Look at me! Look at the shiny! Not the debt you’re probably in like this is a Squid Game!”

Outside of all that, the game itself is really fun. Because Embark is full of ex-DICE employees, they brought the Levolution without calling it that. Almost everything in this game is destructible and it’s not to make the game look pretty. It is a viable and important tactic of screwing over the other teams. Shoot out a wall to make a shortcut. Shoot out the ceiling to make a hole where the money was so you can steal it.

And, yes, I said teams. You will be split into three teams of three with randomly assigned names to give it the whole game show feel. Heads will be on a swivel while you watch out for six other players shooting at you and your team. While that’s going on, you’ll have commentators making snide remarks when your team gets taken out.

The game is very fast paced. And for a not yet finished product, it seems well optimized. The only gripe I had while playing it was I couldn’t control the frame rate in game, so it made OBS misbehave when capturing the first match. If I have to go to Windows to set the FPS of the entire display, that’s not a great sign.

We also noticed that at some points during the initial first moments of launching the game, it will randomly seize up. After a few beats, it’ll spring back to life. Luckily, that’s only happened in menus for most of us. That happened to me while I was doing the tutorial and thought the game had crashed on me. Then, after a few seconds, I saw every command I gave my PC (movements, mouse clicks, etc.) happen all at once. Then the game worked as expected.

You can catch our full thoughts in the video above. I hope this game sticks around because it was the most fun I had in an FPS since playing Overwatch. I feel Embark has something special on their hands here and I hope others feel the same way, too.