Nimble Giant Entertainment announced that their new 1-vs-1 or 2-vs-2 shooter called Quantum League will be entering into open beta on Steam starting February 21st. It looks like yet another Overwatch hero-shooter rip-off from a visual standpoint, but the concept is themed around creating time-loops of your past actions and then diverging from that timeline and playing alongside your time-loop to take down your opponent.

The concept centers around three rounds where the objective is to get to the center marker of the map and stay inside the marker to score a point. The team with the most points by the end of the final round will win the match.

To help increase the originality of the game, there’s an ability to create up to three clones that mimic your behavior. You can use these clones to hunt down your opponent and suppress them, or prevent your opponent from killing one of your clones, or to set up a looping trap to kill your opponent. You can check out the time loop 101 video below to get a brief idea of how the mechanic works.

In some ways it’s a little like Blinx 2 meets Braid meets The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, but it’s an arena shooter instead of a platformer.

The game only features four playable characters, two of whom are black, a third of which is a white male, and a fourth is an Asian chick.

There are six different weapons in the game, including a pistol, a rifle, an SMG, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, and a laser beam.

If you’re still confused about how the game works, there’s a video from Linkypoo that further explains how the game mechanics work, which you can check out below.

The concept of the game is okay, but it’s being utilized in an over-saturated genre that’s become trite and uninteresting.

Arena shooters would be fun if we didn’t have so many of them deluding the market.

Worse yet is that Quantum League’s aesthetic looks like a direct rip-off of Overwatch yet with less interesting characters, which I didn’t think was possible.

The cinematic for the game looks like Overwatch-lite.

I can already imagine most people tuning out of the game for that reason alone.

Toss in the fact that you can see some obvious “diversity” pandering going on, attempting to appeal to a demographic that doesn’t play games, and I can already see Quantum League floundering, flopping, and failing right out of the gate.

It’s not like the people who play Overwatch or Team Fortress 2 are going to stop to play a game with fewer characters, features, modes, and weapons. And it’s not like the people who don’t play either game are going to pick up a new game with fewer characters, features, modes, and weapons yet with the same sort of regressive pandering they see in a bunch of other media they purposely avoid.

So the question becomes: who the heck is Quantum League made for?

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe Nimble Giant Entertainment has a proper read on the market and it will be big business once it wraps up testing following the February 21st open beta.

Then again, it could be yet another get woke, go broke scenario like Lawbreakers or Battleborn, both of whom followed similar pathways to failure.

Anyway, if you want to give the game a try you can wishlist it and participate in the beta come February 21st by visiting the Steam store page.