The Finals On Steam Deck - Is It Any Good

By now, you've probably heard of the Finals, a hot new free-to-play first-person shooter with a lot of destruction. It's a lot of fun to play, especially when you've just completely leveled a building. It's fast, it's frantic, and I'm enjoying it quite a lot. The footage that you're seeing here is from the steam deck OLED, but before going any further, there is a big, smelly elephant in the corner of the room looking pretty angry at me that I need to mention, which is the anti-.

You see, the finals use easy antiche, something that has been a big pain point for Steam Tech and Linux gaming. Overall, easy anti-cheat supports Linux and Steam OS with the Steam deck, but developers have to manually enable that support themselves. No amount of proton updates will magically make the games work; it is down to each individual developer to enable easy anti-cheat.

Now, originally, the finals did not work because it was not enabled. But for about 2 weeks now, it has been working because the developer. It has clearly enabled easy anti-cheap support, but the thing is, the developers have not announced it officially; they've not announced it anywhere that I can see.

On the Steam deck, another point some of you may wish to know is that the finals use a form of AI speech for the announcers; it's using a text-to-speech system. The announcers are a bit cringeworthy as well, but it's kind of the point; it's made to resemble a sort of game show, so they're supposed to be dumb and hypey, and they're kind of easily ignorable, so with that out of the way, how is it on the Steam deck?

Now, an interesting point here is that I was initially testing it with proton experiments, but that has a lot of areas that will make the game just repeatedly freeze and crash. Looking around at the bug reports on it and on proton GitHub, it seems that proton hotfix has some extras in it to make it more stable, and it makes the voice chat not crash the game as well, so what you want to actually do to get the best experience right now is give proton hotfix a try in terms of compatibility.

Settings in my testing of proton hotfix have made the finals really stable since switching over to proton hotfix. I actually haven't seen a single crash. As for the performance, it is a bit all over the place. My testing has been with FSR on balanced, and all other settings, as you'll see here, are on low, and that can range anywhere from 30 to 60 FPS depending on what is going on a lot of the time, though it's actually more so around the 50 FPS mark.

It also depends on what map you're on, the time of day for the map, and the lighting as well. Some maps perform really well, others not as well, but it's been surprisingly playable overall. Now, obviously, while watching this on YouTube, if you're on a bigger screen, the capture won't look anywhere near as good as directly playing it on the Steam deck screen.

It does look much better on the steam deck directly, of course, and for battery life, in my testing, you're probably looking at 2 hours with those settings on a steam deck OLED from a charge, so a fair bit lower with the LCD steam deck, so it's definitely playable, but like a lot of games, it's how you personally feel about the performance and the controls.

It's a really fast-paced game and more than a little tricky to use a controller in it, but part of the charm of the finals is that you don't exactly need the best accuracy either when you can just entirely level a building on top of someone. You could use gyro aiming, but I don't like gyro aiming myself; it confuses my brain.

I'm just not a gyro fan, so I just stick with the GamePad controls. So it is a little bit difficult but not impossible, and eventually you do sort of get used to using the controller in it anyway, with all the explosive action like walls being exploded and buildings crumbling everywhere. It's such a dynamic game that it's just really entertaining and so much fun to actually play.

You're not going to do exactly all that well if you're super competitive, but if, like me, you just want to have a fun time, the finals seem like a pretty reasonable game to pick up. I can't get over how completely frantic it is. You have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. One minute, you're perfectly safe, and the next, a roof is falling on your head, and everything is just crumbling around you with explosions everywhere.

Something else I will address to end with is the player base, because it was a hot new thing initially. It had a lot of players, but the player count has been steadily dropping over time if you look at the number of players over time on the steamed database. As you can see, there is a pretty clear downward trend there, but we're still talking about at least 50,000 peak players each day right now, so it's still pretty good, and it's going to probably stick around for quite some time.

I'm definitely enjoying this one, as challenging as it may be, and it's really great to see another really popular online shooter clearly working on the steam deck, as previously mentioned. For now, just make sure you use Proton Hot Fix, as it does give the most stable experience.