The second season of Embark Studios’ first-person shooter The Finals launches March 14, giving gamers all-new instruments to speedily traverse by — and destroy — its recreation show-inspired ranges. Gamers can already blow holes by partitions, flooring, and ceilings to reshape the sport’s extremely destructible maps, however gamers will get a brand new instrument known as the Dematerializer that straight-up erases components of a degree’s geometry.
However the extra intriguing new solution to destroy issues comes as a part of a brand new recreation mode known as Energy Shift. It’s a spin on a traditional recreation sort seen in shooters like Staff Fortress 2 or Overwatch 2, the place gamers should information a shifting object by a degree, pushing it additional than the opposing crew.
Nonetheless, The Finals’ model comes with a twist. Fairly than having the movable payload on a rail that strikes cleanly by a map, the platform contestants combat over dramatically bulldozes by objects within the atmosphere — buildings, timber, no matter. Something standing in the best way of this unstoppable payload crumbles in its path.
I performed a number of rounds of The Finals’ Energy Shift mode in a current preview construct, and it felt like Embark has a brand new go-to informal mode on its palms. Preventing for management over the platform is simply as thrilling as controlling it, like using a slow-moving theme park experience with all the security measures turned off. Whereas destruction rains round you, the enemy crew — it’s a 5v5 mode, by the best way — is doing all the things it may well, together with lobbing grenades and sniping at your crew from rooftops, to knock you off the mode’s shifting platform.
Picture: Embark Studios by way of Polygon
Energy Shift is each pure chaos and a showcase for simply how spectacular The Finals’ degree destruction mechanics are. It’s additionally a mode the place gamers can change their contestant sort upon respawn, letting them rebalance their crew composition on the fly to match what the opposing crew is doing.
Along with Energy Shift, there are a bunch of recent weapons, devices, and specializations coming to The Finals with season 2. These new additions embrace the aforementioned Dematerializer (for Mediums) that erases bodily surfaces and creates new pathways, an Anti-Gravity Dice (for Heavys) that reverses gravity in a small space to carry up gamers and objects, and the Gateway (for Lights) that deploys a portal that lets gamers teleport brief distances. Mediums additionally get an extremely enjoyable gadget known as the Knowledge Reshaper, which is aptly named because it magically transforms enemy fortifications like turrets or land mines into innocuous objects — like a chair or a “moist ground” signal. It’s all a part of The Finals’ new hacker-themed season, which additionally features a new map known as SYS$HORIZON that’s offered as a glitchy, vaporwave-y cityscape.
For lapsed gamers searching for a purpose to return to The Finals past the everyday arsenal and beauty updates that include new seasons, Energy Shift is essentially the most compelling purpose to revisit the sport. For brand new gamers, it’s an opportunity to see why The Finals’ use of destructible environments is greater than only a gimmick.
The Finals season 2 goes reside Thursday, March 14, on PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Sequence X.