Game Theory: The Finals' twist on online shooting takes your feet right out from under you

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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It’s not easy to stand out in the bloated world of online shooters. (And especially free-to-play online shooters, those glossy digital honey traps designed to convince you that the only thing standing between you and not feeling completely incompetent the entire time you’re playing them is shelling out cash to slap a fancy new skin on your guns). With the exception of a few outliers—1047 Games’ “Halo crossed with Portal” offering Splitgate comes to mind—it’s a play space that encourages refinement, rather than innovation. So credit to The Finals, the new 3 v 3 v 3 competitive murder simulator from Embark Studios, for making my jaw legitimately drop during my first few hours with it, when I saw something I genuinely wasn’t expecting to see.

The plot is, as ever with games like this, unimportant to the point of absurdity. (I think you’re on a game show? There’s a little marshmallow creature that runs the tutorials; I assume it’s the executive producer.) The important thing is that the game is essentially parkour-heavy capture the flag, pitting three or four teams of competitors against each other as they leap and blast their way across big shiny maps, all trying to reach, and then protect, a gaudy ATM as it slowly processes their game-winning piles of cash. (Presumably, EP Marshmallow explained the reasoning behind this all at some point, but I was glossing over pretty hard.)

One game in, though, and things were trucking nicely along with my team of matchmaking-assigned randos. (And here is as good a place as any to issue a formal apology to anyone who found themselves as my teammate while I was researching this column; I was the one jumping into pits every few minutes while his grappling hook flailed listlessly in the wind.) Anyway, we were doing surprisingly well, despite my inability to land a single shot on my opponents, our “Cashout” proceeding nicely as we held the point. (I even revived one of my teammates at one point, meaning that my presence wasn’t strictly detrimental!) The timer was ticking down, our entryways were clear—and then a huge explosion rocked the room we were hunkered down in, and the damn capture device we were protecting dropped down through the floor, where the enemy team proceeded to easily capture it from beneath our still-smoldering feet. Destructible environments aren’t especially new in games, although they’re fairly rare in a multiplayer shooter like this; having our enemies execute a heist to drop our objective out from under us, though, was a fresh one on me.

The biggest thrill of The Finals, then, is the way it uses its approach to verticality, and its surprisingly smashable walls, to force players to think three-dimensionally in a way shooters rarely do. For a genre that spent so many of its early days as little more than a series of corridors filtering into killboxes, the idea of looking at an enemy-held building, grabbing your breaching charge, and deciding where to make your own openings is fascinating. At the same time, it emphasizes how a player in a fight like this can never truly be safe: You might have all your angles covered, but if an opponent uses a rocket launcher to blow the roof off the house you’re hiding in, you’re knocked fantastically out of your comfort zone. There are few things in gaming that feel better than getting a really new perspective on something, and The Finals feels shocking in how it allows a few basic concepts to come together to alter the angles at which we fight.

I don’t expect to spend much more time with The Finals—the online hordes are not kind to my recoil-cursed fingers, and I’ve already started to see a sort of digital horror in my avatars’ eyes, as they realize how many deaths I’m about to subject them to when a game begins. But I was more than happy to dip into it for at least a few days: Gaming technology gets touted and celebrated all the time, more often than not for prettier visuals and not much else. Seeing it applied in a way that genuinely changed the way I had to think about online fighting was a rare and welcome surprise.