The Finals Review

The Finals delivers a genuinely free to play experience with no mandatory purchase to access core combat, ranked playlists or seasonal content. Cosmetic monetization does not impact combat balance, and the base game remains fully playable without investing money. Seasonal battle passes and optional purchases exist but do not gate progression in a way that prevents participation in main game modes. The generous access model is one of the strongest free shooter packages available.

Picking your loadout in The Finals means picking how your class plays. A Medium running the AKM is committing to a controlled, mid-range engagement. The recoil is learnable and the damage rewards staying in the fight long enough to use it. A Light with an SMG is built to get in close and leave before the fight settles. The weapon follows from how the class plays, so switching class changes how a fight opens. Hit feedback is clear and the audio confirms contact, so you know what's landing without checking the kill feed. Unfortunately, Embark has adjusted recoil patterns across multiple seasons and the changes have been disruptive enough to make investing time in a specific weapon feel risky. It's worth checking the current patch state before committing to learning a weapon.

The base movement in The Finals is clean. The Light class has a dash and grapple hook for vertical options, and vaulting and climbing are responsive. The movement layer worth learning comes from destruction. Once you know which floors, walls, and ceilings come down and how fast, you're finding routes that players without that knowledge can't take. A Medium who breaches through a floor to reach a cashout from below is using a line that didn't exist at the start of the round, and the team defending the stairs has no answer for it. That kind of environmental reading has its own skill ceiling. Unfortunately, if Apex or Titanfall 2 is your benchmark for movement depth, the base traversal won't get there. There's no wall-running or momentum chaining, and the destruction traversal is a slower skill to develop.

The three-class system is what The Finals is actually about. The game doesn't have a hard class lock, but a squad built around complementary roles plays a genuinely different game from one that picked what looked individually strong. For example, a Heavy blasting through a wall while the Medium's healing beam keeps them in the fight creates an opening the Light can take from an angle the enemy wasn't watching. The Medium's healing beam and the Heavy's wall demolition are both role-locked, so the coordination windows that win rounds in Cashout require the right composition to run. In ranked, the gap between a squad that built around its classes and one that didn't is noticeable.

In The Finals you don't choose which arena you're playing, so map knowledge across the full rotation matters. Seoul's vertical layout is where the Light's grapple hook pays off most, with rooftops and upper floors creating angles that ground-level play can't cover. Monaco is denser and lower, where destruction mostly removes cover and engagements collapse into closer range. The destruction layer means that knowledge has a dynamic element: routes and cover that were there in round one can be rubble by round three, and knowing which structures fall fast and where fallback positions form once they do is a genuine edge. Unfortunately, some cashout locations in the rotation have a defender advantage that's been present long enough to be well understood and still hasn't been fixed. If you hit one of those spots on offence in ranked, playing for the ring-out is usually the better call.

Cashout has a structure no other active free shooter has matched. Three teams compete over a vault, trying to bank it before the others steal it back, while the arena breaks apart around the fight. Power Shift, the objective-push mode, plays at a different tempo and has its own identity. The problem is what's been removed. Terminal Attack was the game's 5v5 mode with no respawns, where a single mistake ended your round and the tactical read mattered as much as the mechanical one. It's been gone since Season 8, and so has Bank It, leaving a shorter mode list than the game launched with. Beyond the mode removals, there's no offline option. The training range requires a live connection and the only targets available are stationary dummies that don't move at the pace any class actually plays. If you want to work on mechanics outside a live match, the game doesn't give you a way to do it.

The cheating problem in The Finals is real and it hasn't been resolved. Since Season 5 the ranked mode has had a persistent aimbot and wallhack problem in NA lobbies, and the game's anti-cheat hasn't caught up with it. Population isn't the issue; The Finals sits around 50,000 concurrent Steam players as of July 2026, and matchmaking at Platinum and above runs under 90 seconds.

The Finals sits on the fairer end of the free-to-play shooter spectrum. All three classes are available from your first session and every weapon unlocks through play. New weapons join the free pool when they're added, not locked behind a seasonal paywall. No paid blueprint comes with a different reticle or a better stat line. That's been a real issue in other free shooters, and The Finals doesn't have it. The one caveat is the Ultimate tier at $29.99, which includes a 25% XP boost for the full season. It doesn't lock any competitive content, but free players earn progression at a slower pace, and if you're starting mid-season the gap is noticeable. The core competitive game is fully accessible without spending, which is the actual test for any free shooter.