Underrated

If I had to describe this game in one word, I could not find a better one then underrated. After knowing and playing it for a while, I still do not understand how it haven't gotten way more popular over the past few years.

Gameplay

The game is what I'd call a dynamic FPS. The environment is dynamic (you can break/explode everything). The character you play is dynamic (You can choose your class, weapon, abilities, gadgets and how you look). And the game itself feels dynamic (all the matches feel really different with different times, whether, moving platforms and even fogginess).

Not overwhelming

With all the "dynamic" stuff I mentioned earlier it may sound like the game would be really overwhelming at first. But honestly it does not feel like that to me. The game has systems in place to ease players in (like the fact that a new players has to buy almost all the weapons, gadgets and playstyles with a currency that is otherwise useless). Everything feels really intuitive to me, like I see something and I already know how it works or what to do with it. And the more complicated things like all the gadgets all have nice easy to access video showcase in the menu.

Replayable

As I mentioned earlier, the game is insanely dynamic. Which results to every match feeling unique to me in some way. Thanks to this the game is much more replayable to me and I feel like I actually want to play Finals, instead of being drawn to it because I am bored.

Party gamemodes

There's bunch of these fun gamemodes some seasonal some not that people actually play and are really fun. The seasonal ones especially are always really fun for me and feel like some thought and work went into them.

Micro transactions

The Finals is a free game, so it is mostly funded with payed cosmetics. Many games have this system and I personally left a lot of many into some of these (Mainly Valorant around 400EUR). I have to say I love how Finals do this. I have only spent 20EUR total on the Finals. For those I got an entire skin bundle which I can take parts of and combine them with any other skin (Like use a pirate hat with a wedding dress) + I got 20EUR worth of Multibucks (As in I'd get the exact same amount of them if I just bought them). Those I spent on some random singular cosmetics for gadgets that I really liked. I am still left with 1725mb that I am planning to mostly spend on the battlepass premium once I advance in it a bit.

What I'm trying to say here is that Embark doesn't make me feel like the skins are anything more then few lines of code. Valorant for example has such expensive skins that you need to upgrade to have all the functionality...

Linux support!

This obviously means a lot to me so I want to point it out. The game has really great support for linux. In my time on Linux I've only had a problem for like a month when an update greatly decreased performance, which has since been fixed.

Steamdeck

I have even met some people that claimed they were playing entirely from a Steamdeck. I haven't tried that myself yet as I prefer a mouse for an FPS.

Lore

This definitely isn't my number one concern in a FPS. But it would be a shame to not mention it as it definitely makes the game more fun for me. The easiest way to explain the lore is to watch the Ready player one movie (It's a banger of a movie please watch it), the games lore is very much inspired and similar to this movie, even some of the effects look the same (coins falling everywhere after a kill).

The whole lore is fairly hidden and not shoved into our faces. You either have to search for the clues and read all the menu text to find out what's going on or watch a video from someone who has done that (I did the second one :D).

Updates

Here take it with a grain of salt, since I am not that active and might have missed things, but please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong.

I've seen that when Arc raiders released The Finals got a bit forgotten for a bit. But if we ignore that part, to me the updates feel amazing! They add bigger more exciting things, but also little tiny qol additions that I didn't even think I need. It feels like the devs actually play the game and I like that.

The bad

I've mostly just glazed the game so let's talk about what I do not like.

Voice chat

I love voice chat and quite honestly I kept coming back to play Valorant mostly because of the people not the game. The voicechat itself in Finals is fairly fine.

Turned on by default

I do not know what they we're thinking with this one. The voicechat in the Finals (at least in the pc version) is not only turned on by default, but also set to voice activation instead of push-to-talk. It just results in new players having it on for few games without knowing and then getting scared when they discover what happened and turning it off.

Lack of speaking players

I can only speak for the region that I play in which is EU. But I very rarely meet players that actually speak. I know this isn't something the devs can do something about but it does make me want to play less. I also think it may be partially because they get "traumatized" by the enabled-by-default experience I mentioned earlier.

Performance

While overall the performance is great. It just doesn't run on potatoes. This is not a complaint and I don't mind it too much. But it would be great if the game had some super lightweight mode that would work even on the most potatoie of potatoes.

Scopes

I like the scopes and the fact you can change them on all the weapons. What I do not like is that I can't change them in game. I know this seems unnecessary, but hear me out. I would love if I could swap the scope when I die in gamemodes where I can swap weapons. Sometimes I need to play for a bit in a real game with all the scopes to find which one fits me best. Like this I have to play one whole game for each scope.

It also doesn't help that there's no preview of how the scope actually looks in game when choosing it so I have to completely rely on it's vibe and what devs wrote about it.

So what do you think? Will you give the game a shot? Or are you already making a Mastodon account just to tell me how wrong I am? (Please do, I'd love to know ur opinion}