Let Them Come (Xbox One) Review

Let Them Come is a game about a space marine who has some serious confidence. He is bloodthirsty, crazed and a loose cannon that is on his last stand, armed with an immobile turret. Pushed up against a wall, every single alien threat in the base charges at him and the only thing he can do is open fire with infinite ammo. This is the extent of Let Them Come, as a whole. After several waves of monsters, a big alien boss with a ridiculously long health bar will show up and unfairly kill the crazed marine in one or two hits. After dying there, there is the option of retrying the same wave or buying upgrades/ammo types, and that is the simplistic cycle.

The core mechanic in Let Them Come is aiming a turret with an analogue stick that was obviously meant for a mouse, throwing grenades, and melee attacking when monsters get too close. The thing with the aiming, though, is that it is unintuitive in that it works like using the analogue stick like a lever. This makes aiming feel very inaccurate and slow. The lack of directional aiming option is a huge mistake since this requires accuracy and speed when there is a huge blob monster that can kill in one hit.

Most bosses work this way and require the marine to concentrate fire on a weak point so as to cancel out their attack... Of course, this also means juggling to dispatch the two dozen smaller enemies the boss spawned at the same time. This is the real flaw of Let Them Come: the absurd amount of luck required to win many of these unfair fights. The only way to compensate for the sheer randomness and high volume of threats is to grind for points to buy the best ammo and most powerful grenades; dying means that those resources get wasted, so expect to die a lot just during the grind.

Enemies home in on the marine in two ways: on the floor or on the ceiling. When they swarm on the ceiling, things get unreliable since it feels like the turret is only able to hit a much smaller area of space from above and then that's where the melee attack comes in. This melee attack is by far the most unreliable attack in the history of videogames since the wind-up and cool down to use it take way too long in a game that throws dozens of very small and fast face-huggers at the protagonist who is made of plasticine. It's a wonder that the developers made this guy to take a beating as much as he does and not have him die in one hit all the time. They even put some detailed animations into his face and the many levels of damage and various brutally graphic death scenes. Watching his face go from an eager stare to an aroused war cry as it gets flesh slowly stripped away, is oddly satisfying as the gritty dark synth music plays in the background, further adding to the psychotic state of mind.