Preview: The Finals, the fast FPS that goes a little too fast?


In November 2018, a group of former DICE veterans announced the birth of their own studio, Embark, and at the same time their desire to land with several AAA titles, including a slightly different FPS. If the cooperative TPS RCAF Raiders was unveiled first, the studio’s first game bought by Nexon in the meantime will eventually be The Finalsa fully multiplayer FPS in which four teams of three compete in a virtual game to collect cash and secure it to the extraction area. But with only two bonuses for four teams in the running, the vultures will inevitably be out. We were invited by Embark to discover the game for three hours during a remote preview, with the game installed on our machine. No cloud gaming for this preview and we didn’t experience any technical or performance issues for the duration of the session.

Take the money to the mining area is just the start of the scramble

More holey than a gruyere cheese

The Finals is a fast FPS. Nervous, fast, with parts that will take less than ten minutes, there is an arcade side that is not unpleasant. However, we must not confuse speed and haste and if we tend to want to bugger, there is still a significant strategic dimension. If DICE has the fame it has today, it is mainly thanks to its approach to totally destructible environments. The Finals fully appropriates this mechanism allowing strategic approaches, which are ultimately closer to the ways of playing that we could find on Rainbow Six Siege, with all the same a little less serious and the possibility of making holes everywhere. And we do not feel too much remorse to do so, the artistic direction of the game being in the end quite arbitrary.

Making a hole in the ground to separate a team, or creating a diversion while our teammates break through the wall with a lot of explosives are strategies that come quite naturally and quickly while playing. A building can be completely destroyed and the area very quickly looks like a field of ruins. For this preview, we were able to test two areas. Monaco, a very urban map with many three-storey buildings and a more open promenade, and Seoul, with skyscrapers whose tops are connected by zip lines. The maps being of medium size, to avoid constant pressure from opposing teams, benefit from easy movement to give a little verticality to the whole. We will also find for more mobility and coordination, the now essential of every modern FPS that are the slide and the ping system.

At the Old Camper

The game offers a fairly classic arsenal of weapons, ranging from assault rifles to grenade launchers, pistols, shotguns and bazookas. If the feeling of the weapons is good, there is still a lot of balancing work to be done to make the whole thing more coherent and prevent absurd dominations. The Finals already offers a substantial arsenal and many gags. From the enemy detector to the smoke grenade, through the solid foam wall, the automatic turret or the riot shield, our session offered quite a few possible synergies with his teammates. If the game does not offer characters, there are still three archetypes: light, medium and heavy. Beyond the corpulence which will influence the speed of movement or the life bar of our character, each profile also gives access to exclusive skills. A light profile can, for example, make itself invisible, and a medium profile can use a device to heal its allies.

The Finals therefore already displays a certain richness in its arsenal and its proposal, but as explained above, the balancing is not yet developed and this leads to some small problems related to the basic gameplay. It thus becomes a game where you spend a lot of time camping, whether to recover cash or protect the extraction point. Whether or not you like this heinous practice inherent in first-person shooters, the fact that things sometimes get stuck at a point where the outcome of certain games was already over before the countdown timer runs out is quite frustrating. The last minute of the game shakes things up a bit by adding a random event like zero gravity or exploding corpses, but camping remains a constant for the duration of the game.

Even with a grenade launcher, difficult to dislodge campers
Even with a grenade launcher, difficult to dislodge campers



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