3.5/5 ★ – mikeyoong48's review of THE FINALS.

Always enjoy new players entering the field and shaking things up, god knows we needed some change for arena shooters for a while now. The Finals then is unfortunately just not quite there yet. A brilliantly crafted title with some genuinely incredible and game-changing mechanics that also just happens to be everything I dislike about modern gaming. First up: The Finals is very obviously a great game. There’s simply no way ex-Dice developers weren’t going to make a magnificent shooter. The level destructions on display here is mind blowing and actually puts more recent Battlefield titles to shame in how it’s used to actually enhance gameplay. It’s remarkably balanced for launch and is actually so well designed on a whole. (3v3v3 is honestly a novelty in this genre) It’s also a F2P title with yet another BattlePass that will take ages to complete, demands all your playtime, hiding its best items behind paywalls and all ridiculously designed to stand out with no efforts to ground them in any reality. It’s not yet as bad as COD having a bright pink Nicki Minaj running around the map but I sure do miss how older shooters actually has an identity to each of them. Oh and yea, AI generated commentators. TLDR: good game that’s worth a dozen or so hours of your time, maybe even more, but in an age where I’m growing increasingly tired of games that wants to be played forever: I just kind of wish this was a whole lot less of that.