Lemnis Gate – Review
Lemnis Gate is one of those difficult-to-explain concepts that, once understood, becomes relatively simple. Players take turns adding characters to the time loop in each round of the game, which takes place in a single 25-second sliver of time. In Seek & Destroy mode, for example, your goal is to blow up more Resistors than your opponent, so you can use your 25 seconds to claim a few of those targets on your first turn.
Pros:
Looks great
Good mix of shooting and tactics
Clever timeloop system
Cons:
Fairly limited in scope when it comes to content
Score – 8/10
Great, except your opponent can keep track of everything you do with a handy drone, and the 25-second timer loops on their turn, giving them an opportunity to retaliate. Because your character from the first loop can’t respond and can only follow the course you’ve laid out for them, your opponent is free to shoot them in the back with a shotgun at any time, thereby robbing you of the targets you claimed. So, when it’s your turn, what do you do? Kill the man who just murdered you in a game of tit-for-tat? By pursuing a new target, you can open up a new battlefront. Alternatively, why not be strategic and drop some turrets or mines to disrupt your opponent’s future turns?
And thus it goes for five turns, with players either alternating or simultaneously adding two characters to the loop, until the once-calm combat becomes utterly chaotic. You’re in for a harsh awakening if you believe you can just blast away mindlessly. There’s a lot of strategic complexity here. Lemnis Gate has seven characters, each with their own set of weapons and abilities that can be combined in interesting ways.
Striker is a sniper with the power to halt time for a short period of time, which I’ve discovered is often the key to success, although he can be vulnerable when firing from an open vantage point. Thankfully, you may use the android Karl’s shield to cover Striker, allowing him to continue firing headshots in peace. Vendetta’s turrets are typically critical for securing key areas of the map, but they’re useless if she’s killed before they can be installed. You can, however, employ the quick Rush to create havoc so Vendetta can finish her mission. There are lots of opportunities to improvise on the fly as well. When playing Lemnis Gate, you’ll often be yelling at the screen while praising the cunning of your opponents and the game’s features, as you will with many well-designed multiplayer games.
But Lemnis Gate isn’t only innovative; the game’s basic controls and shooting mechanics are also quite good. Sure, it won’t fool you into thinking it’s Halo or Counter-Strike, but it does the job better than it has to. The game’s visuals aren’t innovative, but they’re clean and readable, and it runs at a nice steady pace on the PS5. With the exception of a few of crashes, I didn’t encounter many bugs, which is not something you can expect from an independent game.
So, while what we have here is fantastic, I can’t help but wish there was more of it. The game includes 12 maps, which may seem like a reasonable number, but you only receive three for each of the game’s four modes, which leads to a lot of repetition. There’s also very little single-player content, with the sole offline options being a training room and pass-the-controller same-couch multiplayer. Perhaps this would be acceptable if we knew there would be more, but in this day and age of live services and post-launch roadmaps, Lemnis Gate’s developers have been remarkably quiet regarding the potential of extra content.
This is disappointing, because I believe Lemnis Gate’s unique gameplay have the potential to attract a new, larger audience. Players that appreciate the strategy of online games but lack the fine-tuned FPS skills will have a chance to compete here. They would, at the very least, if Lemnis Gate made an effort to entice them in. The time loop concept seems excellent for a puzzle-driven campaign that could assist new players learn the ropes, but you only receive a 15-minute tutorial and a few training room obstacles before being tossed in the deep end.
The matchmaking by Lemnis Gate only adds to the frustration. Even on PlayStation, the combination of Xbox Game Pass and crossplay means you won’t have to wait long for a match, but you’ll likely be paired with people who are considerably above your skill. Even in Ranked mode, despite the game’s promise that you’ll only be matched with people of similar skill levels, this happens. When it comes to Ranked mode, it uses a very basic “rise in the rankings if you win, fall if you lose” system that ignores the relative levels of the two players – having your hard-won progress stomped out when the game decides to pair you with some Diamond-level beast is demoralising to say the least.
It takes a lot of effort to make any kind of advancement in this game. Lemnis Gate, like many other smaller multiplayer games, seeks to stretch its fairly limited content by making you work hard for every level and unlock. Each character has their own skill tree, and unlocking them all would take hundreds of matches and hours of gameplay. Ratloop Games hasn’t included any microtransactions in Lemnis Gate, to their credit, but the game still feels like it was made for them. If players want to unlock everything Lemnis Gate has to offer, they may feel like they’re trapped in their own little time loop, endlessly replaying the same 12 maps.
