Reviews

• TheLordTomato

  Aug 9, 2023

  fun zombie strategy game
• fp_aldrich

  Aug 9, 2023

  Ball-bustingly hard but very satisfying when you survive!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 18, 2017

  This is a fantastic game. Sleeper hit of the year for me. On the label, this looks like an RTS game with zombies, and neither of those things appeal to me anymore. RTS games have felt rote and stale for more than a decade, and zombies, well, we hit the zombie media saturation point years ago too. The label is deceptive though - They Are Billions combines elements from many different genres and the resulting mix feels decidedly fresh. There's a ton of potential here, not just for TaB but also for something like a new genre: The Part-Time Strategy Game. I'm going to try to list the different unique features of this game to bring out why it feels so interesting and engaging. So this is a turtling PvE RTS where you can pause anytime you like. This gives the players complete control over the APM aspect of the game - rather than an anxiety inducing manic clickfest all the time where the fastest finger always wins, you can play at exactly the speed you want and no faster. In pause mode the buildings you place don't cost money yet so you can make building mistakes without penalty, and even more importantly - in pause mode zambee's can't eat your face. Yet. (They will tho). This isn't just PvE RTS though, it's also got timed waves to beat like tower defense. And unlike most RTS's where everything mostly boils down to a war of attrition between competing production chains and the bigger number usually wins, in TaB all it takes is one zombie to destroy an entire base. This is because in expanding and growing your colony, you are also making lots and lots of humans, aka future-zombies. When a building gets destroyed, all the workers staffing it immediately decide they want to eat your face, and the snowball effect ripples across your entire base very quickly. No matter how big and powerful your base gets, you are always exactly one zahmby away from losing. And there are a LOT of zombii. At least dozens. So even though you can play at the speed you want, the stakes and the tension are always at maximum. You are also locked into ironman mode, so every decision you make matters. It doesn't take very many suboptimal decisions before zombores are eating your face either. They will definitely your face too, and there are a lot of them. Hundreds maybe. If I had to count. So you need a lot of troops and defenses to survive, and you need a lot of resources to make that shit, so you have to expand. And you have to expand defensively, because anything you build that isn't defended is basically just enemy reinforcements. The loop goes something like this - scout, clear out walkers (without alerting too many of them at once), pick out defensive points, expand to said points and set up prelimary defenses, convert new land into resources, convert resources into troops and D, keep scouting and clearing. And you're gonna be doing all of those things at once, all of the time, or, well, face-eating. Every part of the loop has failure potential, and with the stakes at maximum all the time, the ebb and flow of the game is incredibly satisfying and exciting. The random map generator keeps the loop feeling fresh and interesting, because you're never going to be faced with exactly the same situational parameters twice. Sometimes you have a couple of easy chokes to defend but not enough space to convert into resources, sometimes you've got tons of space but not chokes or resources, sometimes you're wedged in between zumbai cities, sometimes you've got tons of wood but no food or stone, and sometimes a lot of zombies eat your face. I think like thousands? Probably. You have to adjust to your circumstances and do the best with what you've got. There's never going to be an optimal build order for this game. The survival waves add increased pressure to maintain your defensive levels, because the waves can come from any direction and you only get a brief warning as to where the face-eating is gonna happen from. All it takes is one weak point at a bad time and well, you know. Nom nom nom. And did I mention how many fucking zubzubs there are? At any given time there gonna be 10s of thousands of the fuckers on the map, and the game engine really does an incredible job of conveying the scope of the conflict and maintaining frames for maximum face eatage. The starting zomboos act like an environmental deterent, and navigating and clearing them even has some stealth elements to consider. Too many guns in the wrong place making too much noise and you could pull too much aggro for you to handle. The zoomba hordes kind of have fluid mechanics, and tend to flow in and around your shit like nasty face-eating goo. I've never seen anything like it in an RTS before and it is very impressive. The final wave does tend to lag a lot, but the metric shitton of face-eaters on the map at that point means you're going to be pausing like a schizoid on acid anyways. It really is a lot of zompers. More than several. The end result is something totally unique - part RTS production buildup, part tactical high-stakes RNGesus navigation, part tower defense planning, part horde-survival nightmare, part learn-through-failure training, part getting your face et. It's quite polished for a recent EA release, and has already been patched several times. It's very addicting and punishingly difficult. Somehow the only thing I want to do after yelling and swearing at a screen full of recent-humans all up in my shit is re-roll the next base. Die again, die better. There are definitely some flaws and annoyances though. If any of these things sound like deal breakers you might want to give it a few patches before trying: -unit pathing is abysmal. you will have to have some patience for some dumb micro. the good news is idiot units tend to get eaten quickly, like they deserve. -the map isn't rotatable and things behind other things don't have outlines. you will have to put up with having some difficulty finding and selecting certain things. -arbitrary space and building limitations make building more awkward than it needs to be. a blueprint tool or copy/paste functionality of some kind would be really nice, but do not exist yet. -the UI has some weird glitches and is sometimes unresponsive. most of the time it's ok, other times you accidentally delete all your walls. so it goes. -units and defenses aren't all that balanced yet. once you've explored the tech tree you're going to be building a lot of snipers, thanatos, and executor towers. Overall though, for me the rough edges are totally worth it. This game is a blast and I don't know of anything quite else like it.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 3, 2018

  This game is brutal. It makes you feel like you're doing really well; it gets you all cheery and confident, giving you the illusion that you may win your first game! Then you see that fucking message "THEY ARE BILLIONS". You believe your defence is finally strong enough to take the onslaught of zombies. Everything seems to be going well until they break through a wall. You don't notice it until they have destroyed all you're beautiful stone houses and zombies fill your entire screen. You freak out taking all your troops off their towers and bringing them all to your command center beleiving that maybe, just maybe you could take one last stand and defend from this brutal attack. As you watch your command center's health drop, your units engulfed with zombies, you admit defeat. Your command center falls and the game over screen pops up. You return to the main menu and you start again because this time, this time you might actually win a game. Great game, would recommend. 10/10
• gamedeal user

  Dec 14, 2017

  You play for 75 days. You've dealt with hordes, and the occasional Harpy showing up and jumping a wall, causing panic for a short while. You might think you've carved out a little haven where your filthy steampunk peasants can toil for you, and eek out a miserable existance for themselves while you ride high as the Honorable Mayor. Then...day 90 happens. It starts like any other day; you upgrade some walls, build turrets where you think you might need them, and back them up with some garrisoned towers. You make a few more units, and build an advanced farm for more food. "Life is good", you say to yourself, sipping what is probably wine mixed with some form of oil; because steampunk. Then a warning. A horde approaches. "Let them come", you think. Well let me just say that this game doesn't care about your carefully placed walls for symmetry; or your finely organized stone houses that your people live in. It will throw a literal wave of infected flesh at you so dense that even triple thick stone walls can't compete with. You fall back to another wall, then another. You watch the infected tear through the streets like a bull in a steampunk china shop, causing exponential problems as they infect more citizens. You hear the last of your units die in agony as the infected swarm your Command Center. Game Over. TL;DR Game lulls you into a false sense of security, before slamming your head into the nearest heavy, blunt object repeatedly. Would recommend.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 6, 2021

  It felt like an endless grind, but I finally completed the game. The shocking part is, this was only on normal (50%) difficulty and the game was still at times brutally difficult. Here are my takes on the game. The game is hard, I mean really hard. There's no way around it. The developers clearly went Dark Souls RTS on this game, but not necessarily as fun. (I still rate this game positively). Couple of things to note BEFORE BUYING this game: 1. There are no saves except save states. This means that no matter the situation of the game, your game gets saved, even if you alt-f4 (I tried this, it doesn't work). 2. You cannot reload previous saved states (this explains the alt-f4). This is probably the worst feature of the game, for many obvious reasons. 3. Levels can take at least 1h30min to complete. No matter what you do, you can't make levels end faster, as some levels require you to beat all waves and these waves are set according to a certain timer. 4. 1 Zombie can ruin your entire game! Yes, you heard that right, 1 god-damn zombie is enough to end your entire game. Since you can't save, you can easily end up having wasted over an hour's worth of game time, having to replay everything. (this happened to me a lot in the early levels). 5. Building hit-points makes absolutely no sense. Each building has hit-points, which is standard for any RTS game. Problem is, you'll never have to worry about it, since buildings never get destroyed. They do however get infected and this happens within the first 10% of health. Infected buildings mean everyone inside turns into a zombie. By this stage, you could be looking at a game-ender if it reaches your houses. 6. You have a skill tree and will never know which ones to research until you've tried them. This can be a make or break situation for your campaign. I actually reset my first attempted play-through. Half way through the first I realized that there aren't enough points to spend and I researched a bunch of not so important perks. I kid you not, but some levels can be way easier just by going a better skill route. This NEVER gets explained, so I suggest that you read up on what some of the best skills are, because you'll regret it later on if you don't. 7. Soldiers are your best friends. These guys seem insignificant, but not until they become veteran with most of the perk upgrades for them. They're cheap and incredibly effective against ALL zombie types with great armor and great health regeneration. You can literally focus on getting these guys along with defenses, although I'd still recommend to combo them with other units too such as snipers and thanatos'. 8. The game is VERY repetitive and can be pretty boring. The entire campaign is rinse and repeat. Each level slightly harder with bigger expectations. i) Build colony with X amount of people. ii) Kill all infected. iii) Survive waves. You get some hero missions too. Always do these first to get the extra research points. 9. I mentioned the game was hard, but I should also add it's very unforgiving. Don't play this game if you're prone to keyboard or screen bashing. The game can bring out the worst in you. 10. Due to it's slow nature, the best experience for this game is setting it on window-fullscreen, playing music in the background and doing some other tasks or even watching Twitch or whatever you like to watch or do. I've literally taken a shower a couple of times and just left the game running (caution though, make sure you're defenses are set first). I know this doesn't seem like a very positive review, but I'm mostly giving everyone insight as these are things I had to learn the hard way. With all this being said, I actually loved playing the game and plan on replaying the game again on Apocalypse difficulty as well as do achievement hunting. The game isn't perfect and there are many things I highly disagree with, but I think the game is pretty awesome for the most part. This game is not for everyone, but worth giving a shot. There are some more in-depth reviews that can be read, so check that out. Hope my review is at least helpful to someone!
• gamedeal user

  Jan 1, 2018

  They Are Billions

  They Are Billions is a steampunk strategy game set on a post-apocalyptic planet, where human race is at extinction. Your goal is to build a colony that can survive in zombie apocalypse world for some period of time. Pros + unique post-apo world + great steampunk artstyle + works pretty well for amounts of units we see sometimes on the screen + enjoyable gameplay ( mix between tower defense and classic RTS ) + very addictive + random generating map + high difficulty Cons: - big lack of units ( currently we got 6 ) - same with buidings ( though its not that bad, just wish for more turrets type ) - would like see some more options to adjust my expierence in survival mode like map size,more hordes, amount of resources on the map etc. Game at this point its pretty good and when devs will add more content into it ( hopping for steam workshop support) its gonna be just a great expierence. Highly recommended for any RTS fans. Will update this review later at release or so.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 21, 2018

  One of the most addictive games I have ever played. Its day 60, I have about 20 rangers, 20 soldiers and 10 snipers roaming the map mopping up the zombie threat. An infected village is up glowing green with infected spewing out the doors and windows. I line my troops up and start a fire and advance tactic, careful to avoid infected spit while I kick in the doors to their shambolic houses. I have a strong economy now with several dozen advanced farms and around 2,000 colonists gradually upgrading their houses to make room for more. My advance farms are reaping wheat and my quarries are chipping stone and gold and bringing it in by the cartload. The infected spawn every 12 days or so in a wave coming from one of 4 locations on the map. They have tested me from the North, South and East and each time thrown themselves onto my triple walls only to be pummeled into pulp. I am searching the map, working out my weak spots. Laying brick work, placing towers, assigining units, creating funnels and chokepoints and killing fields like a good tactician. Its turn 90 now. I already expect the hordes to move in ways I haven't seen before. I have built in several layers of defence. All that I need now is a couple more towers in turn 96 and I will be fine. Oh crap! So much for 100 turns, the horde is here at 96 and my plans for those towers will have to wait. My men are scrambling about, running to thier positions in towers and behind barricades all along the wall at countless points around my city. Here they come! At the officers command the soldiers fire at will. The first rows of the infected crumble and falter feet away from the walls. As barrels get hot and my soldiers sweat it seems the walls are holding. Oh no! Why have the horde seemingly sent all their heavy hitters to just one side? LIke a an old fashioned ship battle the infected are broad siding me in the rear. Instead of taking my broadside of towers and cannons they are rolling up one end of me and are already on the inside. I hastily assemble an inner barricade. Meanwhile the rest of my valiant troops have put to death the infected to the South, West and East and hastily sprint for the Northern breach. At this point I realise the one thing that will cause my downfall. One inner turret was not upgraded and instead of firing high velocity HE rounds is instead firing ballistae. I throw around 50 troops into the narrow gorge between the breach and my town hall praying it will be enough. Firing firing. All the people sized zombies are dead, the fatties too. Thanatos rumbles in and fires a firebomb into their midst. Oh crap! About 30 spitters are at the back SHREDDING through my troops with caustic gunk and my men are dropping like flies. I try to pull my men away, backing up against the town hall hoping and praying for a miracle. I desperately search my city, hoping that I have missed a squad somewhere. No. There is no one coming. All hope is lost. My captain Thanatos lies in ruins as the infected break down the doors to the town hall. To the South lies the fat juciy belly of the city. Looks like lunch.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 19, 2019

  EDIT: Forum Moderators are censoring criticism, image provided at the bottom of this review. After eagerly waiting for this game to come out of Early access and enjoying the concept but waiting for the full delivery, I have to say I'm very disappointed. The promised and very hyped campaign mode looked promising in the small snippets they advertised, but in reality is the same mission over and over with the conditions increased. Build your population to 400-600-800 by Day 25-30-35, destroy all the infected, sometimes don't. Destroy the infected doom houses and build your population. All of these missions are timed, so even after you've destroyed all enemies on the map you will fail unless you've spammed enough farms for population within the time limit for a "victory". People complained about the absurd difficulty of the survival mode within Early Access, and those who voiced this were told to wait for the campaign for a more streamlined experience that will ease you into the game. This is not the case. Difficulty is all over the place but not in the way you'd expect; many elements are trial and error. You either build perfectly the first time by being a veteran player, or you keep re-trying a level over and over until you get it right as there is no save feature in this game. Infected will spawn in locations at set parts of the map without warning to the player or a horde needed, meaning you either turtle from the beginning (and lose, because you're on a timer), or you expand out, kill all zombies, think an area is cleared and zombies will spawn out of thin air to attack your base. I've made a habit of trying a level, dying after finding out where all the hidden spawn points are, and building walls around them because I now know where they are. Not fun at all. As for the "hero" missions, they are literally sending your unit to walk through a map, watching him/her slowly...and I mean slowly, kill each infected one by one as you Attack Move to the end. Your objective is to grab a box and bring it back to the entrance, and so far out of the 4 missions I've played the mission has been the exact same each time. There are no abilities (outside of consumables you can pick up) and very little thought process for this, just A click and watch your character slowly one shot each zombie...and they are billions. Worst still is there are collectables to find in these levels, but somehow they've ignored every prior RTS game that has included hidden items on levels and managed to design them without any visual cue. Background elements may be collectables sometimes and may not be. Collectables will have no distinct visual difference to other objects in the map, and there is no way to tell what can be picked up or not unless you hover your mouse over it. That barrel texture you've seen plastered throughout the map? Out of that group of 8 barrels, 1 of them is collectable, but you'll need to hover your mouse over it to find out. This gets worse when random decals start to become collectables; a bit of chain on the floor, an identical glass bottle out of a group, and worse yet hidden collectables behind background elements, like trees, only fully visible if you disable terrain graphics. Why care about collectables? They are your EXP to spending your talent tree, and how much resources you get in attack missions, meaning if you miss the smallest thing you are weaker for the rest of the game until you repeat that level. That leaves myself and many people on the forums complaining about spending half an hour in fully completed and cleared missions looking for the last hidden element somewhere in a giant map. Look out for the walkthroughs for this one. There appears to be no voice acting, story, or dialogue outside of an opening cutscene. When a campaign was advertised, some sort of story was expected. The final type of mission I've seen so far are "horde" missions, where your objective is to kill a set number of zombies running at your watch tower as you set up a static defence before the mission starts and see how it fares. After several attempts at this mission I was told by a developer on the forums that I should have taken a certain talent choice to be able to place spike barricades to finish these missions. This talent choice costs a lot of points, is the 4th one down on one branch, and requires a lot of investment to take. If the mission was designed with these in mind, why are they not given to the player as mandatory? As there is no way to respec, you are virtually forced to take this, or absolutely min-max the best possible strategy I haven't thought of yet. After 9 attempts of re-designs, screenshots of zombie pattern layouts to figure out where every choke hold is coming from, and a lot of trial and error, I've come to realise that the balancing in this game is simply not there. There are a few "veteran" players that are essentially shutting down complaints that have been present since the start of Early Access for this game that critique the horrible balancing telling them to git gud, but as a RTS player and huge fan myself who has tried more or less all of them and has gone through the thick and thin of different campaign ideas and evolutions, I can tell you that this isn't just a difficulty problem, but fundamentally poor design. Most RTS games ease the player into understanding fundamental mechanics and slowly unlock units and aspects so they can learn how each work at a streamlined pace, this does not. This isn't the fun type of difficulty either, but the cheap one that forces you to start over because you weren't building optimally since the very start, even at the opening tutorial of the game, leaving very little room for experimentation. EDIT: Criticism towards their game is now also being censored as well. Their forum moderator is calling people impatient and new to RTS games, insulting them if they've only tried their game for 2 hours telling them to put more in (past the refund process) if they criticise it. What a mess. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/518880635545190452/590975894483632128/unknown.png After watching their forum moderator get into arguments and now starting to remove and ban users who are critiquing their game, I sincerely regret supporting this developer in any way and heavily encourage people to avoid them.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 13, 2018

  Overall good with a few critical issues. A easy 7/10 in current state. -Fun -Good strat game -Allows you to demonstrate skills at a variety of different difficulty levels -Visually pleasing -Good sounds and music -Wave system is very immersive and cool -Final wave idea is awesome -Veterancy system is cool -Intense gameplay on map 4 (could be good or bad but realkly good for people who like extremely challenging gameplay) Map 1,2,3 are fine and fun on hardest difficulty however, map 4 is a RNG dependent win everytime and isn't fun at all. the agro is a little ridiculous at times and the cities + agro is retarded. if you get a wave that goes through a city its game over. Also dont get me started on seeing harpies on day 10. I find the map gen on other maps is okay, but on map 4 its litterally disgusting. theres random holes in the ground and werid tunnels through rock faces and forests. The food is a little werid at times too, sometimes theres some other times theres litterally none. Food on all other maps is okay. The ai is often very questionable but usually works. Very frusterating when you lose to a AI issue however. sometimes units just dont attack and the pathfinding is honestly brutal at times. I will say though, that the zombie AI is welldone (atleast if the following is true) waves always tend to attack weak points making the game a little harder and zombies are very unpredictable which is the way it should be. Other than unit bugs and such the game runs pretty smoothly. I mean ive seen many color bugs but those are just tiny visual issues and arent a big deal. I wont go into too much detail because i know this is a problem already being addressed by the devs but however the game in its current state lacks content for its 29 cdn price tag. It gave me a fun 100 hours of playtime but now theres litterally nothing to do except do map 4 no pause runs (which is a very painful experience and im not sure why anyone would enjoy such stress) So in the games current state I think it should be half its price, but this information will probably be outdated soon because ive heard they're adding a campaign which will most likely fix this problem. After the first 20 hours or so this really becomes a issue very quickly. the diversity between soldiers, structures and zombies is horrible. Very repetitive gameplay and few ways to explore different strategies. Also a major change they need is a new score system. It needs more factors effecting it. Like add more score for resource production, economy, power etc s All these things in the game need either a buff or a major change. They just don't do nothing for ya in the zombie apocalypse. -Lucifier needs help. I used him in my first game when i didn't know what anything was. I never used him again. Poor AOE and backed with the large cost makes him useless. -Titan really missed his mark. When i first researched these guys i was so excited and ready for some cool bad ass killing machine. I got none of that, all i got was a lame machine gun mech. Attack is lame and doesnt pack enough punch. otherwise everything else with this unit is okay. -Traps are too expensive. I used traps my first game too but never again because i realised they were so expensive and didnt do much. No point buying traps when you could make more units right? -Radar tower should just reveal whole map. No point researching and building this expensive thing when theres a much cheaper look out tower. -The random buildings around the map. Just kindof pointless usually never useful and the walls around them are annoying. Maybe have abandoned mini bases or something more interesting then a single building on its own? -Advanced mill gold upkeep is a little werid. Its upkeep is 500% more than the normal mill and it only makes 66% more power. Its useful when you're super rich otherwise it a horrible investment. By rich i mean like 7k+ econ which is impossible to get on map 3,4. Even when rich its still pointless because if you expand enough you will always have enough room for mills. I will also include a small power plant buff here aswell, seems to underperform for its cost. -Power is a huge issue during everyones time in the apocalypse and i think they need more ways to get power except just mills. -*More zombies less herpes- i mean harpies -More turrets, love the shocktower and balista but a rocket one would be awesome aswell. -*Someone even cooler than thanatos. -Metal structures, I dont know why they dont already have this in the game, theres a wood age, stone age but no metal age? Theres the foundary yes and some cool things to research but no metal houses, walls etc.. -VOD balancing, ive got screenshots of 3 VOD 10 tiles from eachother on map 2. -Maybe instead of having VOD super close together why not have a big zombie city as a option you can turn on or off for extra score? -*More factors effecting score, like power, economy, resource production etc... -More maps, maybe map 5 should be a volcano wasteland with ash floating everywhere, with low visibility but no food, kindof like map 4 except no broken agro. -*More zombies types (no more ranged ones tho we got enough of those) -*More units, structures and maybe a ability to build on water? -*Map 4 balancing (so it isnt cancer to play, took me over 30 tries and 100 rerolls to win because of stupid map issues) -More veterancy tiers. (so people get rewarded for keeping troops alive even longer)