In November 2018, a group of former DICE veterans announced the birth of their own studio, Embark, along with their desire to land with several AAA titles, including a slightly different FPS. If the cooperative TPS RCAF Raiders was first revealed will end up being the studio’s first game purchased by Nexon in the interim The finalea fully multiplayer FPS where four teams of three compete in a virtual collectible game cash and attach 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 explore the game for three hours during a remote preview, with the game installed on our computer. No cloud gaming for this preview and we didn’t experience any technical or performance issues during the session.
More holes than a Gruyere cheese
The finale is a fast FPS. Nervous, fast-paced, with parts lasting less than ten minutes, there is an arcade side that is not unpleasant. We shouldn’t confuse speed with haste, though, and if we tend to mess around, there’s still an important strategic dimension. If DICE has the fame it has today, it’s mostly due to its approach to fully destructible environments. The finale fully utilizes this mechanism allowing for strategic approaches, which are ultimately closer to the ways of playing we could find Rainbow Six Siege, with something less serious and the possibility to make holes everywhere. And we don’t feel too much regret doing that, as the artistic direction of the game is ultimately quite arbitrary.
Making a hole in the ground to separate a team, or creating a distraction while our teammates break through the wall with lots of explosives, are strategies that emerge very naturally and quickly during gameplay. A building can be completely destroyed and the area soon looks like a ruin field. For this preview we were able to test two areas. Monaco, a very urban map with many three-story buildings and a more open promenade, and Seoul, with skyscrapers whose tops are connected by ziplines. The maps are of medium size, to avoid constant pressure from enemy teams, taking advantage of easy movement to give the whole thing a bit of verticality. We will also find for greater mobility and coordination, the now essential of any modern FPS that are the sliding and ping system.
At the Old Camper
The game offers quite a classic arsenal of weapons ranging from assault rifles to grenade launchers, pistols, shotguns and bazookas. If the feel of the weapons is right, there is still a lot of balancing work to be done to make the whole thing more coherent and avoid absurd dominations. The finale already offers a large arsenal and many jokes. From the enemy detector to the smoke grenade, through the solid foam wall, the automatic turret or the riot shield, our session offered a lot of possible synergies with his teammates. If the game does not provide characters, there are still three archetypes: light, medium and heavy. In addition to the corpulence that will affect our character’s movement speed or life bar, each profile also gives access to exclusive skills. For example, a light profile can make itself invisible, and a medium profile can use a device to heal its allies.
The finale therefore already shows a certain richness in its arsenal and its proposal, but as explained above, the balance has not yet been developed and this leads to some minor problems related to the basic gameplay. It becomes such a game where you spend a lot of time camping, whether you want to get a refund or protect the extraction point. Whether or not you like this gruesome practice inherent in first-person shooters, the fact that things are sometimes frozen to the point where the outcome of certain games was already completed before the countdown timer ran out is pretty frustrating. The last minute of the game shakes things up a bit by adding a random event like weightlessness or exploding corpses, but camping remains a constant throughout the game.
