Let Them Come Review

Let Them Come isn't your conventional 2D shooter. Inspired by seminal sci-fi movies like Aliens or Starship Troopers, Let Them Come's concept is about as simple as it gets: you're Rock Gunar, the last surviving member of a doomed crew on a ship overrun by alien life forms intent on gnawing your face off. All you have to do is shoot them to bits, while listening to tunes on your trusty boombox.

As such, your only salvation is a turret equipped with infinite ammunition ensconced behind a barricade; all that stands between you and a messy death at the claws, teeth and tentacles of a monstrous extra-terrestrial. Bullets alone aren't enough to keep you alive, however, and thankfully Let Them Come has a plethora of upgrades you can buy to boost your turret's firepower.

Hero Rock Gunar is also able to hurl grenades, bust out a melee weapon for close encounters and even unleash a power-up if his combo meter reaches capacity. Each of these combo bonuses come in a variety of flavours, from the frenzy pill that speeds up your firepower or double barrels for greater bullet-spewing efficiency, to support drones that help clear the decks of alien scum.

As for new gear, you can acquire plenty, from vanilla frag grenades to the almighty destructive power of the dark matter grenade that sucks everything into its pitch black maw. Melee weapons include knives, electrified batons, a chainsaw and dark matter gauntlet-thing that really only serve as your last line of defence, when things get really desperate. Chances are, if more than a few aliens are close enough to be at the business end of a chainsaw, knife, baseball bat or whatever, you're probably already dead.

Death isn't the end for Rock, though. When you do have your brains devoured by a toothsome beastie, you can take all of the points you've earned and spend them in the inventory, purchasing new types of consumable ammo like armour piercing rounds, shock projectiles and others, or more powerful melee weapons and different grenade types.

You're also able to increase your turret's rate of fire and improve its cooldown, meaning you can fire faster for longer to stave off the onslaught of spindly-legged monsters, pincer-mouthed beasts and exploding tentacled spawn. Armour provides greater resistance to enemy projectiles, while your grenade throwing can also be augmented alongside the rate at which your combo meter builds. There are ammo augmentations too like charged shots, but these seemed utterly useless to me.

By the time Rock is fully upgraded, you'll be a lean mean alien killing machine, which is why Let Them Come's later levels really pour it on. The bosses are an especially challenging bunch, offering differing battles of attrition, some of which demand specific types of ammo in abundance. Fail to have the right supplies, and you'll have to earn enough points with which to buy more.

While Let Them Come is a neat twist on the genre, this being a stationary 2D shooter means you're riveted to one spot, firing up and down using only the left stick. Consequently, it can often seem a little one-note. In providing relentless pixelated alien blasting, however, Let Them Come succeeds, with buckets of 16-bit style gore on display and a succession of enjoyable boss fights.

Each of the game's five stages – each punctuated by a giant boss - unlocks an achievement too, while racking up thousands of alien kills also counts towards your Gamerscore tally. Completing Game Plus and all of the various challenges will take some doing, as will finishing the whole campaign at the highest difficulty. You'd better get buying them upgrades if you want that 1,000G.

A novel 2D shmup that's a slice of noisy, blood-soaked alien blasting fun for a few hours, Let Them Come is a solid way to while away an evening, possibly after watching Aliens, The Thing or something similar. It might not blow your mind, but Let Them Come is the best game in which you sit behind a turret shooting droves of alien monsters in a corridor, you're ever likely to play.