The Finals’ tanky Heavy class is steamrolling the competition, and it’s only taken 7 days for FPS fans to call for a nerf

Three players of The Finals look towards the screen after heading an explosion — (Image credit: Embark Studios)

Hot new FPS on the block The Finals has only been out for seven days, but that’s more than enough time for a meta to form. It’s good news for fans of the tanky Heavy, but seemingly bad news for everyone else.

The Finals offer three classes for you to choose from; Light, Medium, and Heavy. Each comes with differing toolkits that lend to a certain playstyle you can probably get a sense of from the names. The Light class is for the flanking assassins, the Medium offers balance, and the Heavy is for those who like to tank and defend.

Players are falling foul of Heavies for a few reasons - they can pop a shield at a moment’s notice, they have more health, a decent selection of weapons, and other bonuses. Heavies do well when working with a coordinated team who get behind their shield and do even better against other teams who are uncoordinated and going rogue.

I hate heavys from r/thefinals

While Heavy players are also open to being put on a team with others who skedaddle off, some fans reckon the class is flat-out busted. The shield's strength is one thing fans bring up, though another is the strength of the weapons they have at their disposal. The latter point has been made more frustrating for Light mains as they recently had a stun gun removed from their selection pool, which made Heavy mains easier to deal with.

Not everyone is taking the state of the meta lying down, though. A personal favorite of mine is this one Light main who has posted their greatest hits of one-on-one victories versus Heavy mains.

thefinals from r/thefinals

Whether developer Embark Studios does something about the Heavy class remains to be seen. If the team does, though, it may happen sooner rather than later. Just the other day, The Finals developer posted a small patch that tweaked the skill-based matchmaking settings for fairer fights, among other things. It's also possible that people will become happy enough facing Heavy mains once they become better aware of how to deal with them. As ever, we need only wait and see. In the meantime, you best get behind that shield.

I don't say this lightly but I think The Finals, from a team of ex-Battlefield devs, could change the face of PvP FPS games forever.

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.