Let Them Come

Let Them Come strips a shooter down to its most arcade-honest form: pick a spot, don't move much, and hold off an endless stream of alien creatures with an arsenal you build and upgrade run by run. Released in October 2017 with real publisher backing from Versus Evil and tinyBuild, it settled at 84% Very Positive across 617 English reviews, a reasonably healthy showing for a short, focused budget shooter. Reading past the aggregate, the sample tells a fairly clean story: a genuinely tense, well-liked core loop, undercut by a specific, credible set of technical problems the developer never returned to fix.

A simple pitch that earns real tension

Reviewers who engage with the loop on its own terms describe something more considered than the premise's simplicity suggests. One detailed review captures the arc directly: "Let Them Come did not grab me immediately. At first, I thought I understood it: sit still, shoot aliens, keep the screen clear. Simple enough. Then the game started asking more of me." Another, more experienced with the genre, calls it "a rogue lite shooter" that "does things very well," specifically praising the passive-upgrade system once its options click — improving fire rate, weapon cooling, and survivability in combinations that reward experimentation. Achievement data backs this reading up concretely: completion tapers smoothly from 90% on early milestones down to under 3% for the hardest challenge-mode achievements, the kind of gradual curve that indicates real, sustained engagement rather than a game most players abandon immediately.

A freezing bug with no fix in sight

The most serious complaint in the sample is also the most specific. One detailed reviewer describes the problem plainly: "it constantly freezes and unfreezes, making it unplayable. The performance slider does not help with this despite the description literally stating it will." That same reviewer notes forum discussion threads about the issue have gone unanswered by the developer — a claim this review can't independently verify from the outside, but one consistent with what the game's own partner-events history shows: only three real content or bugfix patches were ever released, all clustered within about two months of the October 2017 launch. Everything posted to the game's page since then has been the publisher promoting storewide sales, not the developer returning to the game itself. A performance problem serious enough to make the game "unplayable" for at least one detailed reviewer, with a documented fix that doesn't work and years of subsequent silence from the developer, is worth stating plainly rather than treating as a minor technical footnote.

A softlock two reviewers independently describe the same way

A second, distinct complaint concerns fairness rather than performance: multiple reviewers independently describe specific player mistakes leading to an unwinnable, unrecoverable state. One puts it directly: "if you make a mistake, it's really easy to get softlocked, which beats the purpose of the game... Softlocks happen in such a dumb way that it's impossible to guess beforehand." A second reviewer, writing separately, corroborates the same category of complaint: the game "very easily softlocks you if you play 'wrong,'" adding that it effectively "only allows for one type of play" despite advertising build variety. Two independent reviewers describing the same specific failure mode, in similar language, is strong enough agreement to treat as an accurate account of a real design flaw rather than one player's misunderstanding of the systems.

A shorter, more repetitive experience for some

A smaller but real thread of criticism concerns depth rather than bugs. One reviewer bluntly summarizes the core loop as requiring "basically zero braincells" beyond holding the fire button and spending currency on upgrades, and a separate detailed review notes that dying and restarting from the same wave, rather than resetting the run entirely, undercuts the sense of building toward anything across a full session — "there's no feeling of progression," in that reviewer's words. Neither complaint is universal, and the achievement data's healthy completion curve suggests plenty of players don't share this reaction, but it's a real, coherent minority view worth weighing against the game's stronger reception overall.

A price the game has already corrected itself

One reviewer's complaint is worth addressing directly because the market has effectively already answered it: writing after buying the game for $1.70, they still called it "too expensive considering how limited it is," pointedly noting the original $8.50 list price required real confidence from the developers. That's a fair criticism of the game's initial ambition relative to its actual scope, but it's also a complaint the game's own sales history has since resolved for most buyers — Versus Evil's storefront promotes it in nearly every seasonal sale, and steep discounts to a dollar or two are the norm rather than the exception years after launch. A short, simple arcade shooter asking a AAA-adjacent price at launch was a fair target for criticism in 2017; the same game found consistently for a fraction of that price today is a different, more reasonable value proposition, and it's worth separating the two rather than treating the launch price complaint as still current.

Verdict

Let Them Come delivers exactly what its arcade-shooter pitch promises for most of its reviewers: a short, tense, well-presented wave-defense loop that rewards learning its loadout system, backed by achievement data showing genuine long-term engagement. What keeps it from an easy recommendation is a specific, credible freezing bug with a documented non-functional fix, a corroborated softlock design flaw, and a developer who stopped touching the game entirely within two months of release. Worth its usual steep discount for a short, focused session; go in aware neither technical problem has anywhere left to be fixed.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency; Steam's global achievement statistics API; Tuatara Games/Versus Evil's own partner-events history, showing three content patches within two months of the October 2017 launch and no further game-specific updates since.