He is Coming

I came into this one expecting a novelty act. Retro pixel art, auto-battler label, two-person studio. Usually that combo means a shallow loop dressed up in nostalgia. He is Coming is not that. The core idea is tight enough to keep a shooter-focused reviewer honest: you start with a stick, you have three in-game days to loot two procedurally generated biomes, and then a boss shows up whether you are ready or not. No manual combat inputs, no character levels. Your entire build is your gear. The stat system is deceptively slim. Health, attack, armor, and speed all come from the items you carry, not from any leveling curve. Speed determines turn order in combat, which means prioritizing agility items is a legitimate meta decision with real stakes. Getting hit first by a boss with a brutal passive ability, because you skimped on speed trinkets, is the kind of punishing feedback loop that turns a ten-minute run into a thirty-minute lesson. The boss pool contains over 30 distinct enemies, each with unique mechanics shown to you in advance so you can counter-build. Knowing the boss is coming and still failing to prepare for it is entirely on you, which keeps the frustration directed inward rather than at the RNG gods. Speaking of RNG: the community has flagged it as the biggest friction point, and they are not wrong. As the item pool expands through unlocks, the chance of landing your target synergies in any given run thins out. There is no reroll option in the vanilla loot flow. The developers responded post-launch by adding a banish mechanic that lets you purge an unwanted item from future chest drops, which is the right call, but players who hit this wall before the patch landed bounced hard. It is still Early Access, so expect this to keep getting tuned. The Kingmaker mode is the interesting wildcard. It is asynchronous PVP, meaning your winning build gets uploaded and other players face it as a boss-type opponent. It is opt-in, it costs you nothing in terms of session feel, and it adds a layer of unpredictability that purely procedural bosses cannot replicate. The retro CRT presentation will not appeal to everyone, and the sound design is basic by modern standards. But the minimalism is load-bearing. Runs clock in at five to ten minutes, item synergies like lifesteal builds, thorn damage setups, and speed-stacking agility paths are genuinely varied, and the meta-progression unlocks feel meaningful without invalidating fresh runs. The item set bonuses, triggered when you assemble the right collection of pieces, can completely flip your strategy mid-run in ways that feel earned. For a shooter guy who normally needs netcode discussion to stay engaged with a strategy title, that loop held up across multiple sittings. If the RNG smoothing continues, this one has legs well beyond Early Access.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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