Everything we know about The Finals: Destructive shooter gameplay details and trailers
Sometimes a debut trailer and the pedigree of a game’s development team are enough to make you pay real attention, and that’s just what’s happened with The Finals.
It’s an upcoming free-to-play shooter that will take destructible environments to whole new levels, and we’ve got all the details you need to know about it, right here.
For more upcoming games, check out our lists for the PlayStation 5 or for the Xbox Series X/S.
The Finals trailer
The Finals debuted with a really impressive, albeit very short, trailer in 2022, and you can watch it below.
It contains a pretty overwhelming series of gameplay glimpses, so despite being fairly short, there’s a lot to digest from it.
The Finals release date
We don’t have a release date of any sort for The Finals yet – the first trailer, though, is labelled as “Pre-alpha”.
This means the game should still be a long way off from release, as nice as its graphics look at this stage, with a beta being a more typical time to show off early gameplay.
You can, though, sign up to join an ongoing series of playtests on Steam, if you’re a PC gamer and you want a glimpse of how The Finals is shaping up at this point.
Overall, we’d be very surprised if The Finals released fully anytime before late 2023, but you never quite know how quickly or slowly development on a given project will move.
The Finals platforms
The Finals has been announced for PC and consoles, although it hasn’t been specified which consoles yet.
Based on the destruction and graphical fidelity on show in the trailer, though, we think it’s a fairly safe bet that The Finals won’t end up on PlayStation 4, Xbox One or Nintendo Switch, since it’s likely to simply be too demanding for that older hardware.
If you’re gaming on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, though, you should be safe.
The Finals gameplay
The Finals is a multiplayer shooter played in large arenas with nearly unprecedented levels of destruction on offer to players. You’ll play in squads of three, with four squads competing in each match.
A team of ex-Dice developers is bringing back what players loved about Battlefield iterations like Bad Company 2, letting you completely demolish buildings and areas with explosives, changing the battlefield and making for huge tactical flexibility.
However, this isn’t a po-faced war simulator. The Finals is set in a satirical future where you’re competing in a huge gameshow, fighting other squads to grab loot and bank it at set locations.
You’ll have access to modern weaponry like submachine guns and rocket launchers, as well as classic options like katanas for more up-close fighting, but you’ll also select different characters for different approaches. The trailer features a foam gun used to create cover and new routes, so things can clearly get nice and science-fiction.
Each “body build” will have different attributes to play in different ways, which sounds intriguing.
As you gain success, Embark says you’ll attract sponsorships and new customisation options to make your fighter truly unique, something familiar to fans of racing games, and we love how that could impact on your choice of cosmetics in-game.
Each arena will apparently be based on an iconic place, too, so you might feel like you’re blowing up a fancy arrondissement in Paris or some other glamourous location while you play, too.
There’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t know about The Finals, though, including whether there will be respawn mechanics to get you back into games, and indeed how big each map will be, so we’re looking forward to learning more over the months to come.
