There is a lot of pressure on The Finals season two to deliver. After a massively popular beta and a solid launch a few months later, player numbers have dropped significantly over recent weeks and interest seems to be lowering day by day. The launch of season 2 could bring a lot of those players back, and on paper, it has some interesting additions that would do so. But having been hands-on with it, there are some big issues with the new 5v5 game mode that make it feel like an underwhelming update.
The headline new feature for season two is the new 5v5 Power Shift game mode, which sees two teams try to jump on a platform and then push it to the other side of the map. The team that either makes it to the other team’s side on the platform or gets the furthest when the time expires wins. It’s a mode that will be familiar to anyone who has played Overwatch, but the key thing here is that to move the payload you have to be stood on top of it and that is where the issues start.
The oval-shaped platform you need to be on is reasonably large and crucially has waist-height walls around the outside apart from two small entrances at either end. These walls make it incredibly easy to stay safe on the platform, which will usually be above floor level, allowing you to crouch behind them and use them as cover.
In five matches of the Power Shift mode, only one was remotely close and even then the team on the platform only changed three times, in almost all the others the team that got a good start and took the platform first ended up winning without being forced off.
Even when the opposite team coordinated an assault from above it was easy to fend off. As a heavy with a big shield, I protected my team, who could easily cower behind me and remain on the platform, while I was healed by teammates. This strategy seemed to be unbeatable if we got onto the platform first, but it wasn’t exactly fun. Having five players all looking around for the one or two enemies who would run at us every 20 seconds in a race to see who could shoot them first became boring quickly. Having the team wipe respawn timers only compounded the issue of not having a lot to do for long periods of time.
I’d be very interested to see how Power Shift plays if the walls on the platform were removed. It would mean you could realistically attack from the ground and open up a lot more possibilities to mount a siege on the platform. It may be an overly simplistic solution, but when playing it felt like this would solve a lot of the issues we were finding and would hopefully turn this into a much more fun mode to play.
Outside of the balance issue, this seems like a strange game mode for The Finals which is a heavily movement-based shooter. Forcing characters to stand in a single place and defend for the entire match feels very counter-intuitive, especially for light players. The other modes in The Finals found a good balance between holding locations and movement, and this feels like it swings too far away from that to be fun. There is a decent idea here, but it feels like the execution is too far off to be fun in its current state.
However, it’s not all bad news. The new specializations and gadgets are almost all great, with the Medium’s Dematerializer being a highlight. It allows you to erase physical surfaces, such as walls, to create new lines of sight or paths through the map. In the first Cash Out match I played in the preview session my team and I thought we had a cash-out secured, only to find an enemy had used this new feature to create a hole in the wall next to the cash-out point and steal it behind out backs with seconds to go. Despite losing because of it, it was a great way to lose and should generate some amazing moments for everyone.
So while the big new addition of the 5v5 game mode Power Shift is disappointing and not something I’ll be playing too much of unless there are improvements, the additions to the wider game are great and only improve things. If you are happy playing The Finals in the same way as you always have with a few new toys you will likely find a lot to like in season two, but if you were hoping for a big overhaul to reinvigorate things, you may be disappointed.