I’ve always been a fan of The Finals‘ destructible environments, although I’ve sometimes felt its desire to be a proper, grown-up multiplayer shooter obstructed the simple pleasure of ripping a building apart Red Faction: Guerilla style. But that looks set to change, at least temporarily, with the game’s newly added limited-time mode. This is a straight-up 5v5 slugfest that mostly involves hitting everyone with hammers, and it’s perhaps the closest The Finals has got to pure destructive chaos yet.
Described by Embark Studios as a “platform fighter” mode, Heavy Hitters takes place in a floating arena that resembles a construction yard. Loadouts in Heavy Hitters are fixed, with players all assuming the role of Heavy builds, wielding weighty melee weapons, as well as jump pads, anti-gravity cubes and goo grenades.
The goal of Heavy Hitters is to eject your opponents from the arena, and there’s an interesting mechanical twist here. Players can’t be killed by running out of health. Instead, as your health drops, gravity has less of an effect on your character. Consequently, the more you get walloped, the farther you fly, until you’re eventually launched so far from the arena you have no hope of getting back.
There’s also some silly nonsense about earning rewards by completing contracts sponsored by The Finals’ fictional energy drink Ospuze, which falls neatly in line with the game having utterly dismal worldbuilding. But I don’t care about that, because Heavy Hitters looks like enormous fun, the kind of mode you could cobble together from Unreal Tournament mutators back in the day. And the fact everyone’s running around a small arena wielding sledgehammers means it gets properly wrecked, in a way that’s much easier to track than in the stricter, more intensive vanilla game modes.
Outside of Heavy Hitters, update 6.9 adds a bunch of tiger-themed cosmetics, including a tail and stripey fingernails. It also makes numerous balance changes to weapons, particularly to the KS-23, which gets a significant boost to accuracy in all situations. Finally, there’s the usual raft of bug-fixes, mainly directed toward animations and cosmetics in this case.
Heavy Hitters is available to play now. There’s no word on how long exactly the mode will run for, but since Season 7 of the Finals debuts in June, it seems logical that it’ll be available until then.