In our first two hours of play, The Finals not only demolishes buildings galore, but also many old shooter habits.

“You have to get used to so much destruction,” booms laughter from my headphones. A colleague has just accidentally blown the floor out from under us and transported me and my team, including the mission objective, from the third floor to the ground floor. There we now stand in the rubble and look at each other in bewilderment.

We are playing a pre-release version of the beta of The Finals, the new shooter by former Battlefield veterans at the Swedish studio Embark. And destruction is writ large here – bloody large, in fact. “You can really break just about anything on the map. If you can see it, it usually breaks,” promises creative director Gustav Tilleby.

And I can say one thing right away: we”ve really heard PR slogans like that more often. But it”s not just marketing drivel. The Finals really does have more destruction than we”ve ever seen in any other shooter. Yes, including Battelfield.

“Let”s blow the whole thing up “

The Finals is a virtual game show in which teams of three digital warriors compete in gladiatorial combat. The goal: money! To be the team with the most dough at the end, we have to recover safes, activate them and bring them to cash stations to fill our account.

The trick: As long as the money is flowing, other teams can take over the station and divert the loot into their pockets. So we have to secure our station well against attacks (or hijack those of others) to win.

And here we go with the destruction of The Finals: In the very first match, a rival squad entrenches itself high up in a bunker suspended on wire ropes above the arena and starts tapping money. Clear view for snipers in every direction, the floor lined with mines, barricades provide cover. In any other shooter, this fortress would be virtually impregnable, and at the beginning, each of our attack attempts ends in the respawn screen.

But The Finals is different: “Let”s just blow the whole thing down there,” suggests a colleague. And one well-aimed missile later, the entire suspension system, along with the ATM and all three defenders, rushes to the ground in a cloud of rubble. There, the defenders are easy prey  “Haha, the physics of destruction just levelled the playing field,” my teammate jokes.

A real engineering marvel

And that”s when it dawns on me: the destruction in The Finals isn”t just pretty and spectacular, it forces me to completely rethink familiar situations! You think your mission objective is well secured in a lift shaft surrounded by two metres of reinforced concrete? Well wait until I burst through the ceiling with my Heavy special ability and rain C4 down on your squad!

The other side of the coin: In The Finals I never feel completely safe, as enemies could come from almost any direction at any time and cover is never as stable as you might be used to in other shooters. This increases the tension immensely and makes destruction an extremely important tactical element.

And everything really does get destroyed here: In the beta, I tore down church towers, flattened entire flats and razed parks to the ground with my own hands. All, er, purely for science, of course! Even at its absolute peak of physical demolition mania with Bad Company 2 & Co, the Battlefield series was never so incredibly thorough and comprehensive in its level vandalism.

Every other shooter, no matter how modern, immediately feels static and powerless in terms of flow on the maps compared to The Finals!

In this respect, The Finals is already a technical marvel – especially since everything that happens on the map is calculated on the server side. In this way, the developers ensure that there are never any unfair discrepancies between individual players when it comes to the destruction display.

A class of its own

And aside from its insane destruction, what does The Finals actually offer? Before the match, we choose one of three classes, divided into Heavy, Medium and Light – this body type influences our health, speed and the equipment we take into the match.

We can build pretty much anything our hearts desire, from all-rounders to highly specialised builds: a ninja who flits invisibly across the rooftops and strikes from ambush with a katana? A heavy tank who shields an area with firebombs and a ballistic shield? Or rather a rough-and-tumble man who uses C4 and a rocket launcher to level everything in the way of our squad?

Ideally, we coordinate with our squad and even distribute certain roles: With a defibrillator and healing cannon, I become a medic and restore my comrades in a flash – a weapon not to be underestimated in a shooter where the squad wipe is the greatest danger! If our entire team is wiped out, the respawn timer skyrockets and we have to stand idly by for a while while our rivals stuff their pockets!

Finally something new

In general, teamwork is the order of the day in The Finals: If we attack money vaults in a coordinated manner, plan our manoeuvres together and restore colleagues who have been knocked down, our chances of victory improve significantly.

Solo players who take on other groups of three alone usually have no chance at all, especially since the time to kill is relatively long and kills with one hit are almost impossible – apart from a sniper headshot, perhaps!

So a Heavy may well swallow an entire magazine from the submachine gun before going down – this is not realistic, but it ensures that fights rarely feel unfair and aggressive action is rewarded much more than dull camping.

Due to the mix of vertical map design, fast movement without falling damage and gadgets like jump pads, The Finals almost feels like a classic arena shooter at times. So if you”re looking for realism, you”d better turn quickly towards Tarkov or Squad!

And although speed counts, the hunt for the money boxes plays surprisingly strategically: we constantly swing back and forth between attack and defence as we locate our mission target, escort the vault carrier to the destination and then defend our loot against enemies.

In my first rounds, I had to throw many of my deep-rooted shooter reflexes overboard and partly learn how to fight all over again. But once it clicked, a whole new world opens up in The Finals, where tactical destruction, teamwork and fast gunplay come together in a completely new way.

Don”t get me wrong: I don”t know if The Finals will be really good in the end. How long will the gameplay motivate in the long run? Does the balance work? How is the matchmaking? No idea! But what I have played so far is at least definitely one thing: something refreshingly new!

The Finals is not just a CoD clone or the umpteenth attempt to compulsively remake the tired Battle Royale genre. The Finals is a new shooter attempt – and comes from a studio with a lot of Battlefield expertise that obviously knows its craft very well. And that alone makes The Finals one of the most exciting games of 2023!

Editor”s Verdict

It”s hard to compare The Finals to other shooters. It”s as fast and arcadic as Unreal Tournament, yet tactical like Rainbow Six Siege and the destruction leaves everything we”ve seen in the genre so far behind.

More importantly than any comparison, though, I had an insane amount of fun in my brief playthrough and really missed The Finals in the days following our developer appointment. It”s been a long time since the beta of a multiplayer shooter surprised me so much, even really challenged me! With its insane physics, the game suddenly tears down everything I took for granted.

My tip therefore: Don”t play the beta of The Finals like a normal shooter. Start experimenting with the gadgets and destruction as wildly as you can. Break everything! At some point, that click moment will come. And from that moment on, the maps of all the other multiplayer shooters in the world will suddenly feel like a relic of long-gone LastGen days.