The Finals Season 2 Is Retrowave
I just finished playing season two of the finals at an early preview event hosted by Embark Studios. It's going to be released very soon, if not already out by the time you see this article, and I loved it. I had an absolute blast today, and I'm so excited to tell you about it because this is retro wave season.
I love retro-wave music. I'm there on the Lowii Boy stream all the time. I even have a whole retro wave room in my house that's really fun, so I was totally on board with the theme. The story of season 2 is that hackers, a group called CNS, take over the finals. They hack themselves in; they hack in new weapons and new items; they hack in their own map, which is called CIS Horizon, with a dollar sign like the map itself has been hacked in; and this is the best thing for me.
It's a retro wave map at night with bright purples and pinks, and then during the day it turns into an anime wave soft like Osaka pink, like a very Japanese kind of feeling map. Gorgeous, and we're going to talk about it a lot. They added a new 5v5 mode called Powers Shift that plays a lot like OverWatch.
We got new guns for each class, new gear for each class, a brand new ranking system that got a huge overhaul, and private matches, so as you can tell, I'm super excited to talk about this. Let me just jump into my favorite aspect of the new season, which is the new map. This map is the very definition of retro wave if you've ever seen those articles on YouTube where people are driving like a lorean through like an 8-bit pixel landscape into that sun that's made of the yellow horizontal bars.
That's what playing this map is like when it's in night mode and a little bit in day mode. As we mentioned before, if you play the same map during the day, you don't get as much glowing stuff, but you do get a totally different color scheme that feels anime-inspired to me, like '80s retro anime, where there's so many neat Easter eggs.
Breaking glass on the map makes them shatter like pixels; the water outside the map is big like block waves; the sun that moves around, I kid you not, is literally the retro wave. Sun like that Miami night The sun likes you everywhere you go. At night on the map, there are Saturn's rings soaking up the bit and spinning the bits and spinning them around the sky, but during the day, it turns into Rainbow Road, from Mario Kart, and as much as I love these cosmetics, they're not just cosmetic.
The unusually pixelated areas allow for additional climbing on the map, additional mantle points, and parkour routes. The very distinctly colored rooms There's a yellow museum, a red art exhibit, and a blue classroom. These distinct room colors actually help increase map awareness and callouts, and you always know where you're at.
You're not in the gray room with indistinct stuff; you're in the bright red room with the glowing triangle. You know you're in the art center. It is so fun; it plays so well, and I was very, very happy with it. We'll talk about some of the other cosmetics later, but you guys probably want to know about the new guns, so each class got a new gun.
The medium class got the Famas, which was by far my favorite of all the new weapons; it's an extremely high-risk, high-reward burst rifle. It's got fantastic long-range performance, at least in the build I played. The Famas is kind of like an even more extreme version of the F car, so the F car has a small mag; it shoots a little slower but deals more damage, and it's accurate, so it's high-risk.
High reward This is a higher risk, higher reward; if you land those first, you blow people up; if you miss them, you don't do any damage, and the sword guy stabs you in the back. It's not very good for hip-firing people. I did get some results like that when I'm in their face, but it's really a long-range or medium-range suppression weapon, and it felt.
Right, the best thing I can say about the Famas is that this gun made sense, and everything about it felt right; it felt very intuitive; it felt like I ripped it right out of Black Ops too, and we're just good to go. So the next weapon they added was the 93r, or RFA. The three-round burst pistol for the light class is another Call of Duty weapon; it's roughly equivalent to the Famas I can't talk about it being too different in terms of performance except that being a lighter weapon, you have faster strafe SE speed, faster ads, a little bit better reload, and handling worse range.
worse damage, a little bit more recoil still works really well. I personally didn't get to use this one a lot, but what little I did use, it was really fun. I got killed by it a lot, and the weapon I want to talk the most about is the heavy shotgun. The heavy shotgun was unique and very hard to use, and I initially hated it.
I thought that it was a new shotgun, but what it actually is a new slug, the shotgun. So I was trying to hip-fire people, which didn't work very well. You have to be very precise with your aiming and hit these slugs. These slugs deal an absurd amount of damage when they hit; you know it hits; it blows people up, especially if you get a head shot.
One of the weird things about it, though, is that I was not able to aim down the sights. You can only kind of do this tighter hip-fire spread like the High Ready or the Call of Duty tax stance. I did nail some people at long range, so the heavy is for the heavy class. This is basically a sniper rifle.
If you want to use it that way, I think it's god awful up close because I can't track people that well, but it's a medium. Range weapon for the heavy if you're going to be doing shields and stuff like that fantastic just sit in your bubble shield and try to annihilate people so this one is going to be a LoveHate and one that takes a little bit of getting used to each class also got their own unique new equipment The light class got teleportation and grenades.
In order for these to work, you have to throw both of them; you have to throw one where you're at and then or where you want it to be, and then another one really far where it's going, and they'll pop for about 5 seconds and create a portal that anybody can go through teammates enemies. To the best of my knowledge, you do.
It's kind of like you don't get to see through it like it's a portal, but it basically works like having a portal gun. This is one of the hacked items that were added. The medium class has another hacked item that's, I think, transmogrification or transformation. You can basically just instantly edit a temporary hole in any wall, like it's Fortnite.
You can just open that wall up, you can see right through, you can shoot people, those people can see and shoot you, and you can throw grenades back and forth, so it's not like a shield, but you can just edit that little hole like you're in a box in Fortnite, open it up, shoot through, and then close it again if you want to.
