Hitting

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.

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THE FINALS | Heavy Hitters Event – YouTube

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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.

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The annual Computex computing conference in Taipei, Taiwan, isn’t going to be filled to the brim with as many wacky gadgets as CES 2025, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing noteworthy. Nvidia tried to make the show about itself with the latest in its Blackwell series of GPUs, launching the GeForce RTX 5060 and expanding its AI software suite, and we also got new laptops via the Razer Blade 14 and Acer Predator Triton 14 AI. But amid those expected releases, we also got some quirkier releases, which may prove to be a lot more interesting than an entry-level graphics card.

If you’re on the lookout for the fun stuff, we’ve got you covered. We’ll be keeping this post updated as we see more news from Computex, so stay tuned.

Elgato’s Stream Deck ‘Modules’ Wants to Give Everybody Desktop Buttons

Content creators swear by Stream Decks, but the average layperson may not understand what all the fuss is about. These devices are control panels that are tied to commands on your PC. These keys could offer controls as simple as opening up Adobe Premiere, or as complex as exporting a finished program. Elgato, the maker of some of the more-popular decks, now imagines its Stream Decks as a “platform.” First up is a slew of modules that offer the most-barebones Stream Deck experience with variations that include six, 15, or 32 keys. There’s a separate dock that will let you network a Stream Deck directly through ethernet, as well, but the big push is with a Virtual Stream Deck. This is merely a program that lets you create custom hotkeys you can access with a single click on a desktop.

Asus ROG’s Split Keyboard for Gamers Could Moonlight as a Pair of Nunchucks

If Razer can give us an ergonomic vertical mouse, why shouldn’t Asus’ gamer-centric ROG brand hand us a split keyboard? The company said the Falcata 75% keyboard is good if you only need your WASD keys and need to free up desktop space. It’s using the company’s own ROG HFX V2 magnetic keyboard switches with a customizable 0.1 to 3.5mm travel. But better yet, the switches are hot swappable if you prefer a row of Cherry keys. The split design and removable angled palm rests should offer better ergonomics for people who have issues with carpal tunnel or wrist pain on a traditional singular keyboard. Asus would much rather talk about its 8,000Hz polling rate, which is a measure of how quickly the device can report its key presses to the PC.

The Return of the Mouse With Too Many Keys is Now a Pseudo Stream Deck

Corsair’s Scimitar Elite WL SE was built for gamers who need to quickly hit innumerable hotkeys, and Corsair wants its gamer mouse to be a productivity device as well. The mouse sports a grand total of 16 programmable buttons, the majority of which are on a large “KeySlider” located on the left side of the mouse. This is the kind of mouse that’s ostensibly for competitive MMO gamers who want to have all their actions at easy reach on one hand. Combined with Elgato’s new Stream Deck features, the Scimitar can now bring up Virtual Stream Deck or even execute commands if you need to quickly access your work apps, open up web pages, or access stream controls. Oh, it also comes in white.

This Is Where I’d Put an Xbox Handheld, if I Had One

We were crossing our fingers, hoping to finally see the supposed Xbox-branded handheld PC being produced by Asus at this year’s Computex. Instead, in the first few days, the company dropped a peripheral that seems a little too on the nose if it’s still pretending that an ROG Ally 2 doesn’t exist. The ROG Bulwark Dock is like the many other official and third-party devices meant to keep your Steam Deck or whatever ROG Ally or Ally X you have on hand upright and on a charge. It’s a 7-in-1 dock that supports 4K at 144Hz output through HDMI 2.1. The nice thing about this dock is that the 90-degree USB-C cable isn’t married to any one spot on the device, making it easier to plug into the port of whatever handheld you’re using for power passthrough. Asus says this design, with its shallow cup, will work with phones and laptops as well, but we assume it should be good for an Xbox handheld, whenever that arrives.

You Can Use AI to Make the Plugins for Nvidia’s AI

Nvidia’s AI-ception now includes its own Project G-Assist, combined with a coding tool powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. G-Assist is the company’s chatbot integrated with the Nvidia app, and currently, it’s only capable of offering barebones PC diagnostics or suggesting changes to your graphics settings. The best aspect of the chatbot’s “small language model” is that it works fully on-device, but users themselves may be able to amend the AI’s limited feature set with a plugin builder. This could allow users to make G-Assist interact with other apps. But you don’t even need to know how to code well to build a plugin, as the plugin builder uses a separate AI chatbot to write it for you. Nvidia suggested this will work with apps like Spotify for music and volume control, but we’d much prefer to see it work as a legitimate PC assistant so we don’t need to access several competing apps just to change settings on our keyboards and mice.

This Cute PC Case Wouldn’t Look Out of Place in a Field of Flowers

Judging by their name, Hyte’s X50 cases would seem like any other boxy PC case, but you can already tell by that image that the design is very, very different from the standard black boxes most people are willing to stick under their desk. Both the X50 and X50 Air are made with 1mm-thick steel frame alongside micro-mesh and 4mm laminated glass panels. These are all formed around the cases’ rounded design. The “Air” model only comes in white or black, but the X50 colorways, including “Cherry,” “Taro Milk,” “Strawberry Milk,” and “Matcha Milk” are all colors you would normally find at your local bubble tea spot. At $150, the X50 seems like the kind of case that will make your PC stand out from the pack of hard-edged fish tank designs you see from most companies. The case should arrive sometime this summer.

Dell’s New AI-Centric Laptop Has the Worst Name Imaginable

This is the Dell Pro Max Plus. It’s a name that squashes every rank of iPhone nomenclature into one. Beyond the company’s increasingly confusing naming conventions, the Pro Max Plus has one interesting component you won’t find on most other laptops. It contains a discrete NPU, namely the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 chip. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a dedicated portion of a chip or discrete processor for handling intensive AI processes. A typical PC with the latest AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor can support between 45 and 50 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second. That in itself is a derived value for generally comparing AI processing. The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 hits around 350 TOPS.

It’s not nearly the max TOPS of a discrete graphics processor (the lowest-level Blackwell GPU from Nvidia, the RTX 5060, can do 614 TOPS), but the Dell Pro Max Plus Ultra Premium Supreme, or whatever it’s called, won’t have to worry nearly as much about power consumption with an AI-specific chip.