The Finals Is One of the Most Exciting New Online Shooters in Years | Push Square

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If you’re wondering what confidence feels like, try releasing your free-to-play shooter with no warning during The Game Awards, two days after CoD: Warzone's biggest free update in a year.

That’s exactly what Embark Studios did at the end of last week with The Finals, and it’s fairly remarkable coming from this Warzone-addicted scribe, whose been glued to this newer entrant all weekend — just as he was for its open beta at the end of October.

Embark Studios boasts plenty of ex-Dice developers, and the ethos of older Battlefield games is clear to see: it’s a shooter with a heavy emphasis on destruction and teamwork.

You play in teams of three, individually choosing from three body types for your loadouts, each with a different set of tools and weapons to access, with movement speed and health also affected.

You might make a lightweight, fragile build with a double-barrelled shotgun and a grappling hook to let you buzz around picking stragglers off, or a heavyweight unit armed with ballistic barriers and a sledgehammer to charge through walls and ceilings at will — or anything in between.

Whatever combination of three fighters you come to, you’ll enter a large arena-style map full of verticality, ziplines, barriers, and hazardous barrels. Here, depending on the game mode, you’ll be focused on amassing cash to bank at designated points.

In the main Quick Cash mode, this means securing a lengthy capture point from other teams, with any of them able to convert your banked money if they can capture the point before it finishes ticking down (even right down to the final moments of the process).

Bank It, by contrast, makes saving your cash quicker, and lets you earn coins by eliminating opponents — it’s quicker-paced and