The recent wave of games designed around the mechanics of time loops reveals a simple truth. Time-fucking is cool, it makes you feel clever, and video games, intertwined with the concept of permanent death, are the perfect medium to explore it.

Lemnis Gate dusts off the old-school arena shooter framework and layers it with a pretty brilliant time-loop concept. Each match consists of five overlapping 25-second rounds. In each round, a unique operator is chosen to carry out a mission, which can be a twist on the classic deathmatch, domination, and attack-and-defend modes, or it could be taking orbs from all over the map and bringing them back to your base.

But here's the time twist. Each round (which may be simultaneous with your opponent or turn-based, depending on which match type you participate in) loops through the previous round of play for you and your opponent. This means that by the end of the match, you and your opponent will be running around among your four past selves.

The key to victory is to protect your own objectives while disrupting the enemy's past loopers from carrying out their objectives (this is spiced up in the simultaneous mode, where you and the enemy move simultaneously - imagine making a chess move with someone at the same time). The most obvious way to confuse the enemy is, of course, to shoot them, but there is something even more interesting.

Between rounds and during your opponent's turn, you can fly freely around the map with your observation drone. This is not silly downtime, but an important planning step. You can use the drone to track down particularly disturbing enemies or to mark enemy bottlenecks and launch rockets into them on your turn.

As each round gets busier and more chaotic with the events of the previous round, Lemnis Gate becomes brain-numbingly tactical. In the final round, you feel like a master of the game as you become aware of details such as placing mines in anticipation of the inevitable arrival of the enemy as they come running through a certain door six seconds into the round. Of course, your opponents are also planning their path to victory while you are playing, and they will see gaps that you do not see.

Each new round is a new puzzle. For example, will you shoot a sniper destined to kill a speedster like Tracer and reach your destination before anyone else? Or would it be wiser to use Carl the Robot in the final round to throw shield bubbles around past speedsters and prevent game-changing bullets from reaching their destinations?

Like chess, much of the satisfaction and strategy lies in choosing the right piece for the right move. I like to save Vendetta's operatives (basically engineers) until the end of the game and use three or four of her little turrets that auto-lock on passing enemies to disrupt the board.

Lemnis Gate's extensive arena shooter atmosphere is enhanced by tight, learnable maps set in an intergalactic colony, complete with jump pads and sliding bunny hops for mobility. If the comparable but cartoonish "Quantum League" is a time-loop shooter for the "Fortnite" generation, "Lemnis Gate" is for those who grew up on space stations and asteroid arenas in 1999. The simple weapon set is straight out of the Unreal Tournament archives, with equivalent weapons such as link guns, translocator teleporters, and even bio-rifles that fire with goo.

Lemnis Gate's time-loop mechanic is very clever and makes familiar FPS concepts, such as friendly fire, more interesting than they might otherwise be. On one occasion, an opponent got too aggressive on his turn and blindly tried to annihilate my team, killing a teammate with his orb by misfiring a rocket-propelled grenade. Instead of defeating this berserker on my next turn, I ran to pick up another orb, returned it to my base, and completed his suicide loop while I returned to pick up the orb he had so graciously vacated for me.

And of course, being dead doesn't mean you're dead; once your HP hits 0, you can continue the round as a ghost and continue to carry out your objectives or shoot enemies in that state. In this state, you can and should continue to carry out your objectives and shoot the enemy. If they can save that version of themselves from dying in future rounds, they (or is it still "them"?) will be able to continue to shoot at the enemy. Players are already executing the strategy of killing some of their teammates or past selves with rockets early in the match, finishing the round as ghosts, and then throwing down the orb in later rounds to keep their teammates from dying from the rockets and getting in the loop. You are dealing with an extra player that the enemy did not anticipate.

This kind of intergalactic brainstorming is not found in "Call of Duty." In this game, careful planning and identifying the enemy's weaknesses between rounds can outweigh instantaneous reflexes. it's more "FP chess" than "FPS.

On the other hand, a heroic display of marksmanship can instantly ruin a solid strategy. In one match I was thoroughly outplayed, and going into the final round my opponent had destroyed both of my shitty defensive reactors. I sent out a goofy toxin in an attempt to save at least one of my reactors and bring the match to a draw.

I thought nothing more of it, but with 10 seconds left, I saw an enemy in a time loop cross my view for about half a second on its way to the other reactor. I anticipated the enemy's run and threw a glob as my last trump card. It meant that the turrets in the reactor room would do enough damage to finish them off and my shotgunner guarding the reactor would survive, which meant that the shotgunner would kill the last remaining enemy before they completed the loop and shot the reactor.

And thanks to the photo mode included in the excellent in-game replay system, I can show you the moment that defined that great game: [I haven't felt this kind of ecstasy in a comeback since the heyday of "Rocket League."

Lemnis Gate is not perfect, and not just because its name is more reminiscent of cough syrup than Unreal's gun-toting 4D chess. It does not have the precision that is required in a game where the difference between defeat and victory is very fine. Acceleration and sprinting are choppy, hitboxes around heads and shootable targets aren't always accurate, and rocket launcher crosshairs are a nightmare. So amidst all the wonderful time-loop choreography you (and up to one teammate) devise, there are a few moments of wrenching frustration when your bullet ballet is ruined by a lack of refinement.

But that's a testament to the exuberance that "Lemnis Gate" evokes, and these technical aspects should only strengthen with time. The constant jostling between smart strategy development between rounds and dexterous firefights during the rounds means that a single bullet, a well-placed turret, or in some cases a mass of green globes, can be the key to the game.

The number of players could be higher (cross-play is helpful), and it may be hard to find a complete 2-on-2 game at this point, but that's why it's worth playing with a friend for the affordable price of $20/£16 (free with Game Pass), This is a must for fans of brainy shooters.