The Finals

The Finals is a free-to-play first-person shooter developed and published by Embark Studios, a Stockholm-based game company founded by former DICE developers. It launched worldwide on December 7, 2023, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Windows. The game presents its matches as episodes of a futuristic televised competition called THE FINALS, where contestants fight for fame, sponsors, and prize money inside destructible arenas.

Rather than giving players a conventional military campaign, Embark builds its fiction around the show's production and audience. Contestants are customizable avatars competing in teams of three, while the announcers June and Scotty provide commentary and frame the action as entertainment. The player can select Light, Medium, or Heavy body type, each with different weapon access, abilities, and specializations. This class system supports roles such as reconnaissance, healing, area denial, and breaching, but the game encourages improvisation rather than fixed class duties.

Its signature feature is environmental destruction. Buildings, furniture, walls, and bridges can be damaged or demolished, allowing teams to open new routes, collapse cover, or drop objectives through floors. Gadgets including C4, breaching charges, and glitch grenades make destruction part of tactical planning. The system is not merely cosmetic: a Cashout station can be carried, defended, or stolen, and a destroyed building may expose it to another squad.

The main tournament format centers on Cashout. Teams search for vaults, carry their contents to a cashout station, and hold the site until the timer completes. Eliminated players can be revived by teammates or returned through limited team respawns. Bank It uses a similar cash-collection idea but rewards players for banking carried cash, while Quick Cash simplifies the format into a single active station and shorter rounds.

The arenas mix recognizable places with fictional presentation. Monaco features a resort town and construction zones; Seoul uses dense Korean city architecture; and Las Vegas combines casino interiors with desert surroundings. Kyoto, introduced later, includes traditional Japanese streets and temples, while SYS$HORIZON presents a stylized virtual arena shaped by data and neon architecture. These maps are repeatedly altered by destruction and objective movement, so familiar locations can play differently from match to match.

Embark continues the game through seasonal updates that add maps, weapons, gadgets, events, and balance changes. Its combination of televised fiction, objectives, class abilities, and destruction gives The Finals a distinct identity within shooters.