The Finals

Every shooter that has promised destructible environments has delivered breakable windows. The Finals delivers a building you can drop onto an enemy team, and the reason it works is that the objective is physical: a cashout box sitting in a room, which stops being in a room when you remove the room.

The map is ammunition

Within twenty hours you stop thinking about angles and start thinking about structure. Enemies holding a rooftop are not a problem to be shot; they are standing on something you can delete. I have won rounds by removing a floor and letting the objective fall two storeys into my team's control, and that is not an exploit — it is the intended vocabulary.

The three build classes map onto this cleanly. Light is fast and dies instantly. Heavy carries the tools that reshape terrain. Medium holds things together. The balance between them has wobbled across seasons but the roles have never blurred.

Peak rank

Diamond, twice

Buildings collapsed

Uncountable

Hours as Heavy

Over half

Three teams, not two

Matches run three squads at once, which changes the maths of every fight. Committing to a duel means exposing your back, and the third team is always somewhere. It produces genuine tension in a genre where most engagements are settled by who saw who first.

Where it slips

It is chaotic to a fault. Reading a fight is harder than in any competitive shooter I have played, and at high rank that occasionally tips from exciting into arbitrary — you die to something you could not have seen because a wall you were using stopped existing. That is the design working as intended and it will lose people.

Player numbers have also fluctuated hard between seasons, and matchmaking outside peak hours in Europe can be slow at Diamond.

The verdict

Seventy-eight hours and I still see something new most sessions, which is not something I can say about any other shooter on this site. It is not the most balanced competitive game available and it is by some distance the most interesting.

Free to play. Give it ten hours before judging the chaos.