Path of Exile players love to go fast—and I mean, really fast. They whip through levels, vaporizing thousands of monsters with the staccato clicking of their mouse and keyboard. It's fun to push your character to its limits like that, and it's the reason why previous leagues, like Breach, were so popular. While racing through levels in Breach, players could trigger an ever-expanding portal that would constantly spawn monsters. As long as they kept killing, the portal kept growing. And when it finally collapsed on itself, players were left with an poe currency purchase amount of loot to gather before racing deeper into the level.

This "speed meta" is also why Path of Exile's last league, Bestiary, wasn't received too warmly. It's Pokemon-inspired catch 'em all design was satisfyingly deep but necessitated constant pauses from the wanton slaughter, which isn't that much fun in a game that is all about wanton slaughter. But the new expansion, which launches on June 1, is a combination of both. It has the speed of Breach with a deep strategic layer evocative of Bestiary. Oh, and you also can screw with the time continuum.

These incursions send you into a random room within Atzoatl in the past where you'll only have a limited amount of time to kill all the monsters found there. Each kill grants you more time, but you're still going to need to move as fast as you can. Because this section is so time-intensive, there's no need to worry about picking up items or managing your inventory. A bar on the bottom of the screen tracks your progress toward killing every monster in the area and, once the timer runs out and you're sent back to the present, all the items you would have accumulated spill out in one poe currency trade of loot.

Getting there, however, is a matter of luck. You'll only be sent back to the past 11 times and each room you're sent to is random. The current version of Atzoatl has 13 rooms, and you can be sent back to the same room multiple times, so you won't always have the opportunity to reach the Central Chambers. That's okay for two reasons: There's other objectives to complete in Atzoatl, and your discovery of the temple resets to a new random one each time you complete the present-day version. It's a bit confusing, I know. But Incursion is immediately available to level one players and Alva appears in every zone you enter. So, over the course of the campaign and subsequent endgame, you'll perform incursions, shape the temple, and run the present-day version countless times.