Turns out glowing holes in spacetime are the perfect compliment to a pure battle rifle gunfight. But what about bwooping a portal just in front of your enemy's feet? With the other end opening into a big instakill pit? What about leaping into an enemy portal far below to fly out at hilarious speed and donk them in the spine with a novelty baseball bat? The biggest revelation when playing Splitgate is that, so long as you are using the portals as often as possible, you will perform many of these feats completely by accident. A panicked portal is also the perfect escape mechanism, pooping one right at your feet to Wile E Coyote out of trouble. You can do flanky stuff, sure, putting a portal behind your enemies and stepping through to shoot them in the bum. It isn't long before the heroic possibilities of such a device make themselves clear. The laws of momentum that govern the puzzles of GlaDOS are also present. A crucial veil that makes portal shootouts unpredictable, clever and frequently daft. Unease because you can't see what's on the other side of any portal that isn't your own.
You also get special grenades that blast away enemy portals, which will appear as red ovals on a wall, filling you with unease. But there's no cooldown for the ability, and you can close portals with a tap. You can only place portals on certain blue mesh surfaces.
But you're also flicking out portals with a tap of a button. At its most vanilla, you're racking up kills in a team deathmatch using carbines, plasma rifles, shotguns, SMGs, rocket launchers - all the usual suspects (most of them with a familiar Halo "pop"). Any trailer will reveal at once how it works.