Developer Ratloop Games Canada Publisher Frontier Developments Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now

An untouched, fresh Lemnis Gate map is a beautiful thing, in its way. There are a few quiet seconds before a match begins when, as a drone, you skim over the contours of your soon-to-be battlefield, refamiliarising yourself with all the carefully blocked sightlines and hidden layers of verticality. It’s not that so much that they’re especially entrancing vistas – stacks of prefab buildings in caverns and lunar craters and Endor-like forests, they’re handsome but ultimately serviceable spaces for a shootout. No, the reason you’ll come to cherish these maps in their natural state is that you know what’s to come.

The first character flickers into existence, plays out their own private loop for 25 seconds. Then another, and another, and another, until there are ten or a dozen competitors on the field, all engaged in a tug-of-war over that same half-minute window of time and space. Watching all this unfold, turn after turn, you try to keep up with the action, the splitting threads of cause and effect. By the end of a round, it’s all far too much to take in at once – so that, when the map is wiped clean, and the players swap ends for a second go, it’s an incredible relief. All those muddy overlapping footprints gone, your little untouched patch of snow restored. Time to get it dirty all over again.