He is Coming Early Access Review
The last month of my video game playing time has been a lot of small indie games on the steamdeck. He is Coming is the most recent addition to that roster. The game is a rougelike where you move around a map picking up items and fighting enemies. You’ve got a limited number of item spots and after a set amount of time you’re fighting a boss. Each boss you defeat opens up a couple more inventory slots and you eventually fight a big boss for the area.
Each round is fairly simple, most of your success or loss depends on which items you pair together and if that works well against the next boss. You can preview the boss and its gimmick at any time, giving you the chance to setup a suitable build. There are vendors and other NPCs that can boost your items or give you access to rare higher tier items. Some items for sets, giving you a unique bonus if you have all the set items equipped.
This loop of trying out various combinations of items is unquestionably fun. There are plenty of items unlocked in the beginning and hitting certain milestones unlocks more. Some are simple like defeating the next boss while others might take a bit more planning to unlock. The items you do unlock add to the pool of items in an interesting way without any of them being a sure fire way to breeze through the level.
Right now in early access there are a couple of single player zones and an asynchronous multiplayer mode that I really like. In multiplayer you proceed through the map as normal but fight other player’s builds instead of bosses. If you manage to defeat enough of them you win a crown which can be used to unlock some cosmetics.
Each of the different areas you can unlock have their own unique set of weapons and status effects. The first zone is simple and introduces the game mechanics well while the second has a much wider collection of status effects and battle mechanics to choose from. I enjoyed the new area being almost a fresh start, it kept things challenging and avoided the new area feeling like a reskin with damage values turned up slightly.
The game has plenty of nice quality of life additions despite being so new. For example, after a few games you’ll probably get sick of watching the fights against small enemies play out. The game then nudges you to turn on instant resolution mode which skips the fight animations and keeps the game moving quickly. You cant instantly resolve boss fights but that feels like a good choice.
The game is very well setup for the steam deck, controls are simple and map well. I also think the game is simple enough that it would do fairly well on mobile, we’ll see if it goes down that path but I can see it being something you’d play on a bus ride or some other short stint requiring some distraction.
Judging by the current set of achievements I’ve almost finished the current set of game content. Given it’s in early access they will no doubt add more in the future. What’s there is fun and brings a lot of variety but I can imagine the core experience may get a little stale after a while. The multiplayer is a good feature but I feel like the game may need some more variants to keep things interesting and challenging. That being said, there’s noting wrong with a game that does things well and then is done.
Overall He is Coming is a nice little game that seems well polished already. I look forward to seeing how it evolves over early access and hope that it doubles down on the things it is already doing well.
