Lemnis Gate is a great summary of videogames this year, being a combination of the concepts of time-looping, first -person shooting, and turn-based strategy. It is an ideal play, if you are looking for an FPS game that is more cerebral than Call of Duty. The differentiating concept of this game is almost as well-executed as the time-turner scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. If you know what I am talking about, it makes explaining the game that much easier.
In most ways, Lemnis Gate is a regular first-person shooter. It retains some of the evergreen FPS modes — Domination, Seek & Destroy, Deathmatch and a Capture-the-Flag variant. It even offers seven different operatives, each with their distinct weapons of choice and special powers. But the similarity with FPS games stops with this. Lemnis Gate is the great disruption that has been long awaited in the first-person shooter genre. The laws of time employed in the game are not easy to explain, but the game tries its best to politely transition into how the turn-based nature of attack and defense works.
This year has seen a substantial number of games abusing the concept of time-loops. However, Lemnis Gate escapes from becoming a cliché, by making the turn-based strategy the inadvertent selling point. The net game time of one half of the game is 25 seconds. These 25 seconds are looped on repeat till each player completes all their moves. Consider the Seek and Destroy mode.
A player from Team A finds and destroys the enemy Resistor. From above, unseen by Team A, hovers a drone belonging to Team B. Team B scopes out Team A’s moves, much like how Harry and Hermione tiptoe around their past selves. After the 25 seconds conclude, Team B now sets their player out to replay the same 25 seconds and protect their resistor from enemy damage. The game proceeds till all the turns are exhausted, with each team trying to one-up their enemy’s last move.
While the construct of turn-based strategy is like many games, its execution is refreshing; no one has modded a chess-like game this graphically (not even Harry and Ron in the Philosopher’s Stone). It’s strategy with the satisfaction of head-on Player vs Player conflict. Lemnis Gate is currently available on the PC, Xboxes and PSes, can be played online, and does not support cross-platform play. I rate the game with the lemniscate symbol, because as its name indicates, it provides the potential of countless strategic possibilities across its maps, modes, and player-types.
Anusha Ganapathi
@quofles
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)