------Original review preserved for integrity purposes. Find the next line break for the meaty updates-----

He is coming is a game the harkens back visually to classic RPG titles like Ultima, with modern sensibilities.

The core game flow is that you must collect synergizing bits and bobs that make your man powerful enough to stop a big bad that's going to show up in so many turns whether you think you can handle him or not! Combat handles itself, so for the most part you are building a funny little fightmans machine in the hopes to be Fightman enough to defeat your evil nemesis, the Badman. Will your Fightman's fightsystem outfight Badman's patented Manbad Beatman Fightsystem? You can either think it out or slug it out. It's a short, sweet, approachable loop that I've used a solid 8 hours on over two days. It's good.

You unlock new things by reaching abstract and unknowable critera like "Do 10 damage in one turn" or "Die in one turn" or the notably absent: "Wear three hats simultaneously" which was very funny but yielded no unlocks. Four hats would be ridiculous, do not @ me about four hats.

I haven't beaten a single run yet, and I do have some gripes.

An absurd quantity of items activate "At battle start" or "On the first turn" which leads to an incredibly uninteresting build situation outlined as follows:

1. Fightman rocks up. activates all of his buffs.
2 Badman activates all of his buffs.
3 The fight either ends, or All the buffs disappear and you're left to whittle away in a low-power 1DPS race to the bottom.

I had one very fun build that involved abilities that triggered off of attacks, which triggered other supporting abilities, which led to a very prolonged fight that waxed and waned armor/health values between the fighters, but it seems like the devs saw me coming with a final boss mechanic that punished it specifically.

The other major gripe I have is that the loot pool for synergies becomes *massively* polluted and there's nothing you can do about it.
Synergized builds seem to actually be pretty narrow in their scopes. Early on there's a pretty limited pool of pretty standard tools that you can kind of see how they could work together. It makes you feel very clever finding a way to make your bombs explode twice! You figure out in a couple of runs what would work well together and how the mechanics activate in a way that would make sense, and it's not hard to come up with a plan to roll for some specific pieces of recurring gear.

The trouble starts when you find that all the time you've spent building this knowledge has also been time spent unlocking increasingly esoteric, niche items that also all socket very neatly into their own weirdly specific builds. So now every run begins with you finding a piece of LEGO™️ gear that it would be great to create a synergy around, but you're going to spend the next significant portion of the run trying to merge that thing in with a collection of Playdoughs, K'nex, and Erector set bits that you've unlocked with your last seven trips through the Harbor Freight of Horrors.

Overall, this is a game that intrinsically lucky people are going to excel at, and unlucky people are going to have a very rough time influencing enough to find success in. Being a pretty lucky guy myself, I gotta' say that when a build is coming together it feels very nice! Nice enough to recommend the game! Fortunately,(?) when a build is not coming together the game will soundly kick your ass and your next Coming is only a click away.

This game starts tight and fun but turns into a drops-pool-bloated frustration gacha after a few hours. My personal thought is that if they got rid of the requirements for finding fusion golems and cooking pots, and instead just gave you the better item, that'd go a long way. I have spent many, MANY runs now totally cooked because I can't find the jackass who will give me back some inventory space.

------------ Review update!-------------

They are listening to feedback and since writing the original post there has been an update that gives you some bans, but the quantity of bans is highly lacking at the time of this update. A measly two or three bans when you're trying to cut something like 20 superfluous items from a run doesn't feel like any meaningful control.

I did however clear the opening region (forest) entirely on accident with a build that I didn't actually synergize in any meaningful ways that I could determine. The nearest we could figure is that we entered the fight against the final boss carrying a weapon that stacked damage every other turn and that's what was required to maintain parity. It felt... bad, honestly. For all the theorizing and synergizing that went into every other failed run, to pull it out actually at random sort of drove home a that a lot of my original gripes are still bang on the money.

HOWEVER! The story doesn't stop there. The second zone, the swamp, seems to have all of the interesting items that I was specifically mourning a lack of in the previous review! There's all kinds of weapons and items that pop off in relation to other effects popping off! There's locations on the map that allow you to fast-travel to regions with much needed utilities! It's Everything I was asking for which leads me to wonder why the opening area is simultaneously the most frustrating, and also the least interesting experience for a new player?

It feels like there's a lot of dev time that is going into the exciting and interesting location and game modes, to the detriment of the new player experience. This is not unique to He is Coming. Games have a tendency to be very overtuned at launch because the people working on and providing feedback for games in development become familiar with the way that things work, and balance explicitly to the type of meta-knowledge-fueled build-perversion that develops in those circles.

Digging into the swamp zone, we find the game isn't devoid of interesting mechanical complexity! It's just that the game is deeply terrified of scaring a new player in the starting forest with anything actually exciting and has taken great pains hiding the intrigue from new players.

So, I am flipping the review to recommended, with the caveat that you should just play the multiplayer kingmaker mode and get your feet bloodied right away. All the interesting mechanics are hiding there out the gate, and being the PVP mode, it's going to see the heaving bulk of player feedback and get the most balance changes when things feel truly bad.

------Original review preserved for integrity purposes. Find the next line break for the meaty updates----- He is coming is a game the harkens back visually to classic RPG titles like Ultima, with modern sensibilities. The core game flow is that you must collect synergizing bits and bobs that make your man powerful enough to stop a big bad that's going to show up in so many turns whether you think you can handle him or not! Combat handles itself, so for the most part you are building a funny little fightmans machine in the hopes to be Fightman enough to defeat your evil nemesis, the Badman. Will your Fightman's fightsystem outfight Badman's patented Manbad Beatman Fightsystem? You can either think it out or slug it out. It's a short, sweet, approachable loop that I've used a solid 8 hours on over two days. It's good. You unlock new things by reaching abstract and unknowable critera like "Do 10 damage in one turn" or "Die in one turn" or the notably absent: "Wear three hats simultaneously" which was very funny but yielded no unlocks. Four hats would be ridiculous, do not @ me about four hats. I haven't beaten a single run yet, and I do have some gripes. An absurd quantity of items activate "At battle start" or "On the first turn" which leads to an incredibly uninteresting build situation outlined as follows: 1. Fightman rocks up. activates all of his buffs. 2 Badman activates all of his buffs. 3 The fight either ends, or All the buffs disappear and you're left to whittle away in a low-power 1DPS race to the bottom. I had one very fun build that involved abilities that triggered off of attacks, which triggered other supporting abilities, which led to a very prolonged fight that waxed and waned armor/health values between the fighters, but it seems like the devs saw me coming with a final boss mechanic that punished it specifically. The other major gripe I have is that the loot pool for synergies becomes *massively* polluted and there's nothing you can do about it. Synergized builds seem to actually be pretty narrow in their scopes. Early on there's a pretty limited pool of pretty standard tools that you can kind of see how they could work together. It makes you feel very clever finding a way to make your bombs explode twice! You figure out in a couple of runs what would work well together and how the mechanics activate in a way that would make sense, and it's not hard to come up with a plan to roll for some specific pieces of recurring gear. The trouble starts when you find that all the time you've spent building this knowledge has also been time spent unlocking increasingly esoteric, niche items that also all socket very neatly into their own weirdly specific builds. So now every run begins with you finding a piece of LEGO™️ gear that it would be great to create a synergy around, but you're going to spend the next significant portion of the run trying to merge that thing in with a collection of Playdoughs, K'nex, and Erector set bits that you've unlocked with your last seven trips through the Harbor Freight of Horrors. Overall, this is a game that intrinsically lucky people are going to excel at, and unlucky people are going to have a very rough time influencing enough to find success in. Being a pretty lucky guy myself, I gotta' say that when a build is coming together it feels very nice! Nice enough to recommend the game! Fortunately,(?) when a build is not coming together the game will soundly kick your ass and your next Coming is only a click away. This game starts tight and fun but turns into a drops-pool-bloated frustration gacha after a few hours. My personal thought is that if they got rid of the requirements for finding fusion golems and cooking pots, and instead just [i]gave you the better item[/i], that'd go a long way. I have spent many, MANY runs now totally cooked because I can't find the jackass who will give me back some inventory space. ------------ Review update!------------- They are listening to feedback and since writing the original post there has been an update that gives you some bans, but the quantity of bans is highly lacking at the time of this update. A measly two or three bans when you're trying to cut something like 20 superfluous items from a run doesn't feel like any meaningful control. I did however clear the opening region (forest) entirely on accident with a build that I didn't actually synergize in any meaningful ways that I could determine. The nearest we could figure is that we entered the fight against the final boss carrying a weapon that stacked damage every other turn and that's what was required to maintain parity. It felt... bad, honestly. For all the theorizing and synergizing that went into every other failed run, to pull it out actually at random sort of drove home a that a lot of my original gripes are still bang on the money. HOWEVER! The story doesn't stop there. The second zone, the swamp, seems to have all of the interesting items that I was specifically mourning a lack of in the previous review! There's all kinds of weapons and items that pop off in relation to other effects popping off! There's locations on the map that allow you to fast-travel to regions with much needed utilities! It's [i]Everything I was asking for[/i] which leads me to wonder why the opening area is simultaneously the most frustrating, and also the least interesting experience for a new player? It feels like there's a lot of dev time that is going into the exciting and interesting location and game modes, to the detriment of the new player experience. This is not unique to He is Coming. Games have a tendency to be very overtuned at launch because the people working on and providing feedback for games in development become familiar with the way that things work, and balance explicitly to the type of meta-knowledge-fueled build-perversion that develops in those circles. Digging into the swamp zone, we find the game isn't devoid of interesting mechanical complexity! It's just that the game is deeply terrified of scaring a new player in the starting forest with anything actually exciting and has taken great pains hiding the intrigue from new players. So, I am flipping the review to recommended, with the caveat that you should just play the multiplayer kingmaker mode and get your feet bloodied right away. All the interesting mechanics are hiding there out the gate, and being the PVP mode, it's going to see the heaving bulk of player feedback and get the most balance changes when things feel truly bad.