Before launch, The Finals was mostly known as The FPS With Destruction That Isn’t Battlefield. Just about every wall and floor can be blown up, opening new pathways or completely collapsing the map in on itself for an advantage.

For season 2, the destructibility comes to the fore in the new game mode, Power Shift. I got the chance to play it with other press and developers from Embark, and there’s never been this much architectural carnage in The Finals before. It’s a sight to behold, but it isn’t very good.

Power Shift is the first 5v5 game mode, ditching the 3v3v3 of Cash Grab. It works a lot like King of the Hill or Payload in other games, with each team fighting for control of a large platform. The catch is that the platform slowly floats towards a team’s base, carving up buildings in its unstoppable progress.

At first glance, there’s something spectacular about Power Shift. The platform wobbles and bobs as players jump onto it, and seeing it demolish an entire wall more efficiently than any RPG or grenade could is a visual feast. Even the image of one team holding out in the wreckage as the opposing team comes from all angles to take the platform is awesome.

But Power Shift highlights that there’s so much more to The Finals than a physics-filled playground of devastation. Once you look past all that, you find an FPS with immensely satisfying gunplay, an open-ended character system that lets you tailor your loadouts for your team’s needs, and objectives that constantly move across the map to keep you and your parkour skills alert. When you take all that away, you end up with Power Shift.

Power Shift focuses all of its action onto one specific point of the map. Sure, it moves around as the match progresses, but there’s none of the will-they-won’t-they of guessing where a team is heading to cash out, and therefore none of the wild chases and parkour moments. You know everyone is always going to focus on the platform, turning into a mindless churn of heading there, fighting a bit, dying, and repeating.

The mode is incredibly ‘win-more’. The first team to secure the platform is likely to hold it for the entire match. The platform itself doesn’t have any destructible elements itself, meaning the first team to dig in has a massive advantage hiding behind indestructible walls.

It also heavily dissuades you from running light characters. Each character build in other game modes has a role to play – lights can head to points quicker, or get away with the cash faster. Heavies can tank hits and become the focal point of a firefight. Mediums have the most utility in solid jack-of-all-trades builds. Working with your team and playing to your build’s strengths is one of the best bits of The Finals – especially when you find interesting ways to pull off complex plays, like I did with the new gadgets coming in Season 2.

But in Power Shift, all that’s needed is to park your keister on the platform, and so the Heavies and their high defensive capabilities excel, while the Lights and even Mediums just get swatted away like mosquitos.

It's especially obnoxious when a team stacks up Heavies with shields and disruptors. There’s no way to cause area-of-effect damage thanks to the disruptors, and the shields also block off direct gunfire. Sometimes you’re lucky and find that one weak spot to exploit, but most of the time you’ll just be throwing yourself at a wall for 20 minutes until the match ends and you leave unsatisfied.

In the end, my entire team was groaning at each new team wipe. We’d tried everything to break through, come up with solid plans only to have them quashed game after game. Even the one we got onto the platform first for was a slog, as winning just means sitting in one place until the game ends. The fun premise gave way to nothing but frustration, which I’ve never felt playing The Finals before.

With a few tweaks – mostly giving the attacking team a way to break through and disrupt the team on the platform – Power Shift could be an excellent mode. Right now, though, it’s just unbalanced and unfun. It feels like Embark was too in love with the image of a massive frisbee KO’ing a skyscraper to realise the mode doesn’t gel with everything else that makes The Finals great.

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The Finals

FPS Released December 8, 2023 ESRB T For Teen Due To Violence Developer(s) Embark Studios Publisher(s) Embark Studios Engine Unreal Engine 5 Multiplayer Online Multiplayer Cross-Platform Play PC, PS5 & Xbox Series X|S
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WHERE TO PLAY

SUBSCRIPTION
DIGITAL
Platform(s) PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S Powered by Expand Collapse