Final Exam

My honest first impression of Final Exam was that it felt like something rescued from a dusty arcade cabinet: loud, unpretentious, and a little rough around the edges in ways that are sometimes charming and sometimes genuinely annoying. Mighty Rocket Studio built this as a 2.5D beat-em-up for up to four players, and you can feel every design decision bending toward that co-op scenario, even when you're playing alone. The four playable characters - Brutal Joe the ex-quarterback, Nathan the gadget-obsessed nerd, Cassy the agile street dancer, and Sean the long-range firearms hobbyist - each carry a distinct playstyle, and the game layers a skill tree on top that lets you sink experience points into new moves, stat boosts, and special abilities. The combat itself leans into juggling and combo-chaining: you can launch enemies airborne, slam them back down, weave in handguns and shotguns mid-string, or hold a combo counter to absurd heights before cashing it in for a score multiplier. That risk-reward tension around the combo counter is genuinely the game's most interesting mechanical idea, and it rewards players willing to learn it. Melee weapons range from cricket bats and crowbars to more chaotic options, and throwables include grenades, molotovs, and rocket launchers you find scattered through each stage. Where the game stumbles is in how quickly that combat loop wears thin. The levels are structured as large non-linear rooms full of objectives - rescue kids, fetch wooden planks, escort mechanics, collect samples - but the open layout backfires. You end up running back and forth across the same hallways while enemies respawn endlessly, which is exactly the kind of grind that kills momentum in a brawler. Critics at the time flagged the combat becoming the same handful of combo strings regardless of what weapon you were holding, and that criticism is fair. The variety promised by twenty unlockable weapons and four distinct characters doesn't fully survive contact with the actual level design. The art carries more personality than the moment-to-moment action deserves. The monster designs are semi-cartoony and genuinely distinct, and the horror-movie-cliche characters are played with enough self-awareness that the tone lands closer to loving parody than cheap knockoff. The game has a lineage worth knowing: Mighty Rocket Studio were the people behind the original ObsCure survival horror games, and Final Exam started life as a spiritual successor before a name change. That history doesn't affect how it plays in 2025, but it explains the affection baked into the setting. The honest recommendation is this: solo, Final Exam is a middling budget brawler with a 66 Metacritic score that feels exactly right. With two to four players in local or online co-op, the repetition becomes shared chaos, the backtracking becomes a joke you're all suffering through together, and the score-attack loop has something to compete over. It is, as the community put it, brief - a session or two to clear. If that sounds like an evening well spent with the right group, it is.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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