This year has been a great year for video games and their developers. Games such as “Little Nightmares II”, Yakuza: Like A Dragon” and “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart” have received many good reviews. With other future titles like “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – The Hinokami Chronicles” and “Back 4 Blood” also dropping, it is safe to say that gamers are going to have a delightful rest of the year. 

Made by Ratloop Games Canada and Frontier Developments plc, “Lemnis Gate”, came out Sept 28, 2021. The game was released on PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One. It’s a turn-based combat strategy First Person Shooter(FPS) that focuses on deep space combat and time loops. The game is both multiplayer and crossplay. 

There are 5 operatives to choose from, each of them have separate abilities that help either defend or attack. It can be played either solo or multiplayer. There are 3 game modes: Retrieve XM, Domination and Search and Destroy. Retrieving XM is similar to capturing the flag​​. In all of these game modes, completing the objective can be done either simoustanly or seperate. The “exotic matter” lies around the map and has to be taken back to spawn and it has to be retrieved before the opponent. In Domination, the goal is to shoot the power accelerator up to a certain point to get points. Like Retrieve XM, the players not only have to stop each other from shooting the power accelerators, but they also need to gain points. The final game mode, Seek and Destroy, is the best out of the three. To win the game, the “resistors” have to be eliminated to score points. A great deal of damage has to be done to the armor before the object within can be destroyed. All of these games have a time limit of 25 seconds before it is the opponent’s turn. In each of these game modes there are 10 rounds total and on the 5th round before the sides switch.

Lemnis Gate relies on heavily using the brain to predict where the opponent is going to be and where to shoot. Each of the operators’ special abilities have to be used masterfully to win the game. The player has to be conservative with their time or the game is lost.  It is a very fun and strategic game. The game also has a great soundtrack. The graphics are also good, they are clear and could possibly be compared to real life scenery. The game modes and the turn-based mechanic are also done really well. The game modes compliment the turn based mechanic really well.

The game has a lot of pros, but there are also some cons. Although the graphics are good, when the match starts, it takes a while to load. For a while, it is as if there are only blurs. A big problem that has also occurred is the music after a game has ended. Randomly, the music will repeat a single note, which annoys everyone around. The final problem that’s been encountered is the time it takes to get into a match. Usually in a multiplayer game, a casual que time is shorter than a ranked que time. That is not the case here. In Lemnis Gate, the casual time is longer than the ranked time. When queuing into a ranked, it took around 10 seconds to a minute to get into the game. A game wouldn’t even load up when trying to get into a casual match. This could be the case because the game just came out, but it doesn’t really make sense considering past game experiences. 

Lemnis Gate is really fun for a $20 game. There are, of course, good and bad things about it. Overall, the game deserves a 7/10.