The Finals has frenetic gameplay full of destruction | hands-on preview

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The first-person shooter action in Embark Studios’ The Finals moves pretty fast. And if you’re a bit slow like me to catch on to what is happening, it can pass you by.

I’ve been curious about it because I’ve followed Stockholm, Sweden-based Embark Studios’ — a division of Nexon — for some time. This title is a free-to-play team shooter that I tried out at a press event last week in preparation for the launch of the game’s two-week closed beta test, which runs from March 7 to March 21.

The Finals is a virtual combat game show that takes a lot of its humor and wit from The Hunger Games, at least the spectator culture of the film. You team up with two other players to fight against a few other teams in competition for virtual prizes as if you were competing for your life for prizes while providing an entertaining broadcast for spectators. As you fight, broadcasters gleefully narrate the proceedings.

I wished we had more of a backstory, as we saw with The Hunger Games, to go with the action. As such, your basic instruction is, “If you can see it, you can probably destroy it.”

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I signed up via Steam and moved into the press beta. And, sadly, the version I played didn’t support an Xbox controller, which is what I used to play shooters. And so I had to play with a mouse and keyboard, and that wasn’t pretty. Here’s what I saw.

The game itself is in beta and has a bunch of bugs. But I didn’t see many of them in the hour or so that I