THE FINALS

Fame and fortune await – if you don’t get flattened first

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Our gun is trained on the doorway and our surviving teammate is skulking in the corner with a dagger, ready for any intruder that might try to scupper our chances in this virtual gameshow. Suddenly, the walls cave in, the ceiling collapses, and gunfire, explosions and expanding blobs of goo start to fill the room. We’ve made an elementary mistake, which is to treat The Finals like a conventional shooter.

Amplified destruction is just one of the twists introduced by this free-to-play first-person shooter from Embark Studios, the company founded in 2018 by veterans of DICE and the Battlefield series. “Sometimes it feels as if the game industry has been reskinning the same game over and over again,” the studio’s chief content officer, Rob Runesson, notes. “We actually said: ‘There must be things here nobody has tried’.” Where most shooters glue our eyes to the iron sights, The Finals has us scouring the world for opportunities to traverse, transform and weaponise it.

This dovetails with another of the game’s pillars: player freedom, expressed in