Two months ago, Tuatara Games announced their new Vampire Survivors-esque game, Let Them Come: Onslaught. Set on an alien planet, Onslaught features you as the lone survivor trying to fight your way out of hordes of aliens. At this stage of development the gameplay is fairly well polished, and the graphics are shaping up well. However, the weapon designs give me pause, and I hope that there are more changes planned before launch.
My primary concern is that many weapons are manually aimed, except that ‘manual’ in this case means the direction you are running in. You spend most of the game in various forms of retreat, so firing in front of me is useless. These weapons can be helpful when you are being surrounded and you need to punch a hole to escape, but even then the usefulness is questionable. I hope they will either allow us to independently aim using the second stick, or give us more options for auto-targeting equipment. Well, just more options in general, honestly.
Weapon selection aside, Let Them Come: Onslaught is shaping up to be a solid entry into the Survivors-like genre. You progressively get stronger with each run, although it does feel like the ramp up is slower than in similar games I have played. Still, it does nail that “just one more run” feeling. On the other hand, aside from shifting the setting to space, Onslaught doesn’t bring much new to the genre. There’s nothing wrong with simply executing on genre conventions well, but it is getting to be a rather crowded market. There’s plenty to indicate that the Tuatara team has more plans for the game, but at the moment we will have to wait and see what they do to distinguish Let Them Come: Onslaught from the competition.