They Are Billions

The game is way too unforgiving to enjoy. As someone that enjoys Ixion and the Frostpunk games, this game just feels unfair.

Even at Normal difficulty, the swarms can easily overrun your defenses.

Furthermore, no checkpoints mean that if you incorrectly prepare for the next wave, you need to start over from the whole beginning of the mission. It feels genuinely awefull when your hour run is completely lost because you Warning says "Swarm is coming from the East" and then they come wrong the west and east.

The hero missions are just boring. You use a slow walking unit that you park at a optimal range and wait as he slowly guns down each zombie one by one.

Unbelievably great game! A classic. Played over 460 hours over the years. Its a must buy. They need to either make more like this or make a new one! I need more games like this.

everything is perfect then one zombie spawns and destroys everything. it isn't a fun mechanic

Play on easy, spend hours on one level by carefully planning your colony then one zombie slips through and then you die and have to restart the level again. 10/10

This game is personally my favorite RTS of all time, It perfectly Balances unique re-playability and Challenging yet rewarding gameplay. It is a must have for any strategy player!

This game needed to decide if it wanted to be a slow methodical game with hour+ long missions you cannot fast forward through including waves of enemies that create death spirals OR a game with no save slots.

Either would be fine. But making me sit and wait for day 50something in game before launching the final wave which is significantly harder than the rest of the mission and then going "oh sorry, your defences weren't good enough. Go replay the entire game from day 1" is bad game design.

It feels like they didn't actually want to include a campaign mode but felt obligated to and never considered how that would go with the save mechanics of the quickplay.

grate game i really like it but i will say im really upset with the diffecolty level if you put it to max deff and get to the desert (one level befor the end survivel) its just dumb the game is reged to send the big mutints even if you dont make any noise and in case you manage to kill one dont worry they send 2 :)

TLDR: If you are not a RTS/City Builder veteran, avoid this game. Otherwise, highly worth the price.

Pros:
- Fun and satisfying gameplay, especially for players who loves defense missions in RTS
- Open ended tech tree with varying levels of effectiveness
- Interesting maps that are fun and challenging

Cons:
- Excessively long mission timers
- Brutally unforgiving game

Comments

I always come back to this game as a staple base-building and expanding game. It's a different flavor from games like Civilizations and honestly I do a lot worse in this but I enjoy it and it's low-stakes enough I can be loose and careless but still have fun just building, clearing more area, and trying to expand.

The game is a tonne of fun. I really enjoy all the voice lines. They add a lot of flavor.

Aw, silly zombie, you can't beat me.
Oh look, you've brought a friend. 2 friends. 5 friends? 20 friends? 80 friends? Uh oh.

They Are Billions is brutal and unforgiving. One reason, the billions of zombies (duh), the other reason is autosave. You won't have a good save to fall back on. You restart the mission. An attack can go from, "We're holding!" to "We're all going to die." in about 30s.

I have loads of fun playing the game and it's possible I'm terrible at it. But I do come back to it. And get my butt kicked. I will be back though! Stupid zombies and their stupid wall killing fists.

Play mission, lose, get reset back to the beginning. Play same mission, lose, get reset back to the beginning. Play same mission, lose to population goal, get reset back to the beginning. Close game, uninstall, never play again. Reinstall, open game, get reset back to the beginning.

There's a lot of good here, but ultimately the main campaign which is the biggest attraction of the game is heavily flawed in it's progression. Frequently a mission ends with a huge zombie horde attacking you. Due to the save system, this means you can easily spend an hour or two playing on a doomed run only to get stomped because of mistakes you made 45 minutes ago, with no chance to correct it. Upgrades are point based, where missions and "hero missions" that can earn points determine what you can unlock. Unfortunately, the upgrade system is really harsh and doesn't offer respecs, so it's very easy to soft-lock yourself 30-40 hours into the game, and that **Really** sucks if you're just learning the game. I've played for multiple resets, gotten further each time, but often hit a position where it's like "I could spend an hour and half trying something just to see if I don't destroyed 2 minutes by the final wave, but that's just not fun." I usually am really down with harsh games, but in my opinion the distance between "you fucked up" and "you're dead" should be minutes, not hours.

If it's on sale, or if they do a big update on this (unlikely) I'd say it's an awesome indie rts, but as is I'd only buy if it you're into a really unique RTS with pointlessly masochistic mechanics that actively discourage learning. I'd still keep a close eye and see if these developers have another game, because while there's 1 or 2 serious flaws, there's a real diamond in the rough here.

Great and quite a unique strategy game.
On higher difficulty waves are quite brutal.
Campaign is long

A good and well rounded game that had one of the 'good ending' outcomes for the early access path. So why am I not recommending? Because the game is designed for people with huge amounts of free time and an ability to keep replaying the same scenarios over and over again without getting bored. 'But you have almost 300 hours in the game!' Yes, because I used to have lots of free time, and I am fairly tolerant of playing the same scenarios over and over again.

What it comes down to is a focus by the devs on that style of gameplay, and a lack of polish at the finish line when they released the game. They made a hardcore RTS designed around iron man mode gameplay. When you lose a map, you've lost the map and have to start over from the start. Is that frustrating? Yes. Is it a big deal? No. UNLESS you do not have huge amounts of free time. Each map in arcade mode tends to take about 2 hours give or take some change depending on how much you pause. In campaign mode, it is fairly similarly length per map.

This length combined with the ironman save mode, combined with that one or a couple zombies slipping through your line can quickly spiral out of control and end your playthrough even if you're doing well quickly kills all motivation to try again when you realize you have to start over from scratch and wasted the last hour of your life. 'Well why not reload?' There is no save and reload system. You could use task manager to force-crash the game to recover from the last autosave, but this is unreliable at best. You could also go into your file system and back up the save files manually, but this is an incredibly asinine work around for what should frankly be a difficulty option for the player to choose whether to enable or disable ironman mode.

Even better is they used the same design philosophy for the campaign mode. When you spend research points, that's it, they're gone. And you get only enough points in the campaign to unlock about half to two thirds of the tech tree, so if you've fallen for their terribly balanced trap tech upgrades like corpse recycling, good luck actually finishing the campaign. My first playthrough I got all the way to the last mission just to realize after 6 to 8 attempts that I had terribly specced my upgrades, and only managed to limp to the finish line to be struck down for my foolishness to buy techs that sound good, but are terrible in comparison to their peers. 'So reset the tech tree, or go farm more points'. Can't and can't. There's no way to get more tech points outside of 'complete mission / find all drops in no-build mission'. You can't respecc your tech upgrades without hacking the save file with cheat engine. The Devs expect you to either know better than to take the bad techs, to restart from mission zero and replay about 50 hours of repetitive 'story' maps with no actual story beyond 3 passive aggressive cutscenes. Or best of all (as per their response to people asking about tech resetting) 'you should have backed up your saves during the campaign' as though it should be the player's expectation for their dungeon master to go out of their way to sabotage them early on with trap techs. Could be solved with some balance passes to make the bad techs a little better. Could be solved by adding some radiant map modes to farm more tech points. Could be solved by allowing some/all techs to be refunded to respecc your build. But no, the answer was 'get good, we designed it this way'.

Now speaking of no build maps, again they're utterly asinine. You are expected to learn bug exploits via animation cancelling in order to quickscope enemies to survive the hoards in later maps. There are two player characters, one of which is a tanky heavy hitting brute, the other a nimble quick shooting kiter. The problem is, there are enemies that outpace the kiter. On those maps including them, the literal only strategy to kill said enemies is to run away and throw a grenade in front of you to exploit the lack of friendly fire damage to kill the enemy as it closes the gap. There is no other strategy. The kiter is severely weaker than the brute, to the point that when I played using the brute, I had to restart a map maybe twice? I had to go online to find the foot grenade method for the kiter due to how weak they are. And there is a level up system, but between the animation cancelling and the fact you get one skill point per finished level equaling barely even half their skill tree, it both feels pointless and has a huge number of 'trap' level ups you can get again that either will do nothing to help you, or barely help at all. And if all that isn't enough, you still have to deal with it being ironman mode so you have to restart if one of those fast enemies 2-shots your kiter hero out of nowhere. Add on to no-build missions being a collectathon for science/money loot. Problem is, the loot looks identical to many a background filler object that blends in extremely well with the background. It will 'blink' occasionally/unreliably when you enter the room. I don't know what the trigger or timing is as it seems incredibly random and unreliable, so you'll end up having to pixel scan every square inch of a room to make sure those 3 pixels behind another prop aren't an obscured cup you need to collect for your empire wealth loot. As with other complaints customers made, the devs just sneered over this one too, citing that it was how they designed the game and how it's staying.

Overall conclusion; this game is a diamond in the rough that really needed a few more months in the over to finish cooking, but seemed like the devs got it out asap so they could move on to other projects. Feedback has always been received incredibly negatively with a condescending attitude and the kind of ego you expect from Triple-A studios lecturing you about how they know better, rather than acknowledging they too are human and might have made some poor design decisions they ought to have revised to address that not all their customers are going to have days at a time of free time to play / might be a little salty when their pristine level playthrough goes sideways due to one minor mistake that ends up causing the last 2 hours of gameplay to have been a complete waste of time.

Most of these issues could have been fixed by adding a couple of difficulty adjustment options to toggle ironman mode on maps, to allow multiple autosaves, to allow tech/hero level refund, very simple/minor things to implement too. But after years of early access / praise based on the WIP I guess they either got fed up working on the game / the ego went to their heads and they knew better than everyone else saying otherwise.

Save your money and your time and go play something that doesn't actively despise you lol. Unless you like hardcore games and have tons of free time, then go for it and you will probably love it like I used to.

Quite fun game, very difficult, and sometimes very frustrating. You can lose after 6+ hours of gameplay because a single zombie came from an unexpected direction or you ran out of time at the very end searching for the last zombie on the map. That being said, this game is a timesink, you will dump 4+ hours into one stage of one map, it is what it is. The tech tree is interesting with some choices just being absolutely neccesary to progress (Wooden Butress ftw). The game is truly about redundancies, build a wall and then a second one, unless there is a forest closing an area off the entire area needs to be walled, guarded, and spiked. The devs really could have fixed some QOL stuff, or at least allow a modding scene but didn't happen unfortunately. Well worth 30$ though, you can easily dump 100+ just into the campaign in one run.
Oh PS if there was one thing I could complain about its the TERRIBLE voice acting, reccomend turning off voices.

TLDR: Brutally difficult 'pause-based' RTS that demands micromanagement but is fun enough to scratch an itch.

Pros:
- Awesome art design, story, setting, and character design
- Building is a ton of fun and strategy is layered
- Campaign mode makes you feel like you're actually doing something

Cons:
- Punishingly difficult even at easy settings...mainly due to crappy notifications of when your units are getting obliterated.
- Upgrade tree is very unbalanced. You'll feel 'equipped' for only the last 2-3 missions of the campaign
- Bad voice acting

Its fun relaxing game till a fucking zombie comes up to ur fu.... tent and just wipes your progress

Its a great game does have a learning curve to it so don't get discouraged. Also make sure you pause the game when planning out where to put stuff. i think that is the biggest mistake. So don't rush your thoughts.

this game is so fun when you do missions from the workshop. But it's funner with the story on it's own.

Great game. Be careful you keep a watchful eye on rogue zombies. ;-)

the game is good, but the hero mission ruin it all... its pure trash. boring pixel hunting and waiting my hero kill all the zombies.

Super fun and can be quite challenging, giving you that good feeling when you finish a level.

I love this game, its amazing. I have been playing now on and off for a few years and it never get old.

One of my favorite games, there's many different ways to win and be challenged. Even if it didn't have great replayability, just one play-through is amazing. Awesome game I wish there was more!!

Hands down one of if not the best base builder + tower defense game!

Disclaimer, my hours are a bit inflated because of accidentally leaving it paused over night a few times, but I have at least 150-200 hours in it.

Something that this game does really well is walking the line between being difficult in a way that is challenging and pushes you to better understand the mechanics and utilize them to the fullest, and just all out frustration. You definitely lose more than you win, but that just makes it all the more satisfying when you finally figure out how to overcome the challenge. I also really like how there are a lot viable strategies to win, and how you have to adapt to the environment and what resources and space are available.

The downside for games like this for me is honestly more of a personal problem but I spend tons of time paused trying to get everything perfect, start buildings or tech the second I have resources, min-maxing power, workers, etc. etc. so sometimes progress feels really slow, and you can lose it all by getting a bit greedy and trying to take a town before you are ready, or not quite having enough defenses for the next wave.

One really unique thing about this game is some of the mechanics such as there being more zombies in waves if you have not cleared the map in the direction the wave comes from, this really pushes you to clear the map besides just getting extra resources and space.

Overall, great game that I recommend to anyone regardless of if you are particularly into this genre or not. I have a large rts background, but not really base building/optimization/tower defense, and it is a great intro into the genre. Really the only reason I can think not to get this game is if you categorically do not like zombies.

A 10hp walker zombie hit a house after 120 mins of gameplay while my army was away. Everyone was infected within 30 seconds. A skill issue on my part. Game is peak RTS

I don't like giving this game a thumbs down, because it does so much right. Fantastic setting, really well polished, lots of character, great campaign, varied missions - almost steampunk Red Alert with zombies. But the thing that made me rage quit and not go back was the complete randomness of whether you success or not, and thats because you don't know where the hordes are coming from until its too late - you can not prepare. You can play the mission, die, and repeating know where the hordes are coming from, but that isn't fun and there must be a better way. Or sometimes there just aren't hordes... Solve that issue and the game is great.

WARNING: NOT FOR THE AVERAGE GAMER. This is an interesting concept but absolutely read through negative reviews before buying this game. A lot of them make valid points but I thought I knew better. This is not for the average gamer that has a life. This game is severely disrespectful of your time, primarily because there is no save function from which you can branch out and try new strategies from a critical point. This makes zero sense and is literally just a false difficulty barrier the devs put in for some reason. That being the case, the key to "being good" at the game is to have lots and lots of free time. Of my almost 40 hours played, 12 of them are for 3 attempts at the same mission. That's 12 hours of micromanaging the exact same conditions for a slow, boring buildup during which only about the last 10 minutes of each run mattered. So 30 minutes of learning in 12 hours. This results in an extremely slow learning curve for the game which is why all the people who praise it have hundreds if not thousands of hours. The devs also lock the game files so nobody can mod or improve the game. I wanted to like this, but all of the good is heavily outweighed by the awful decision to prevent saving the game state.

TLDR: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. IT TAKES WAY TOO MUCH TIME TO GET TO A POINT WHERE YOU CAN ACTUALLY LEARN ANYTHING AND IMPROVE YOUR PLAY STYLE. DEVS HAVE ABANDONED IT AND WILL NOT FIX ANYTHING.

A well designed game, that is held back by a lack of core RTS features

Developers that ran before the game was even close to reaching its full potential

An RTS campaign that in no way shape or form respects your time or intelligence

Unit path finding will lose you games

In a game all about horde waves, you cannot see where the hordes will arrive

Attack towers will attack whoever they want and you will like it

Forced ironman mode

No map sharing -> limited community growth

No pre game customisation, even though it makes RTS games

Don't buy it, the game doesn't respect you and you shouldn't respect it

Although there are some nice things, the fact that you can't save progress is the deal breaker. In my opinion, its a stupid flaw that any game developer should already know better than to do.

This game is awesome. It is by no means perfect, but Numanitian Games made a great game. I only wish they had continued to evolve the game and make it better, though perhaps the idea that a game should be continuously worked on is a more modern idea. After all, the norm used to be that a game would be made and the finished product was what you got. That being said, I would absolutely love to see an expansion for the game. The only thing I really disliked were the hero missions. Painfully slow and dull. I feel like I didn't get to utilize the arsenal of available units that much (seldom made lucifers, very useful but wasn't my preference) and it would have been nice to have unlocked the entire tech tree in the campaign.

As for the devs themselves, I haven't seen them active on their socials or website in years so are they still making games? Who knows. Hopefully they have more wonderful games to deliver in the future.

its so merciless. You can be playing happily building your colony for houses then for catastrophe to cascade. Its hilarious.

Spent hours building a glorious empire. One zombie shows up for a snack, no big deal my archer can make it in time. Five minutes later, everything’s on fire, the disease is spreading like gossip, and my archer is dead—along with my hopes and dreams.

Eight hours of careful planning, reduced to a zombie buffet.

10/10. The only thing spreading faster than the plague is my regret.

Closing in on 1,000 hours and still keep going. Something about how challenging this game is keeps me coming back for more. Would be nice if the devs added some new content but guess they are satisfied with what it is.

The difficulty was 270%, the map was Frozen Highlands, the day was only 46, our policy? No walls, no pausing, no attack towers, no traps, infantry only. We were on a path to victory. The armed forces were camped outside an infected city. Everything was looking good. We were assembling an army to take on the hordes dwelling within. F*cking Debby the Ranger, fires an arrow at an infected structure, and brings down an entire colony. A thousand souls, this b*tch sentences a thousand souls to death, with an arrow. This b*tch fired one of Apollo's arrows of plague, basically.

Yes I recommend this game. and yes, I am going to try again, until I win.

I waited years for a game like this to come out. I have always wanted a city builder that focuses on rts elements, but everything else missed the mark for me by being too technical, complicated or grindy. I love this game, i have to be in the mood to think when i play it though. IT IS GREAT FOR MY ADHD when i need a distraction. Im excited for any coming DLC or expansions.

Hope that this amazing game will have it's sequel or major update with multiplayer capabilities and more content

Harder then you think it would be. Or maybe I just suck. There are huge difficulty spikes in missions when the horde comes and you can't reload a previous save if you die (whole mission must be restarted).

Missions are very long, but you can quit and save whenever you want.

worth a try if on sale.

This has got to be the best game i have ever played, Loved the campaign, and tons of other custom content to enjoy as well. Well worth the money, Ive personally spent 350 hours in this game.

Interesting idea. I like the artstyle and theme alot, but this game has possibly the worst pathing in an rts I've ever tried. Even the flamethrower troops in the first command and conquer from the 90's are easier to control, and that says alot.
There's also a train on every map with tracks that seems to disrupt the pathing even more.

Since you don't have the option to change the pathing of these tracks. You are stuck with what you are given.

What a lovely riff on the RTS genre this is :-) it is a perfect game for anyone that has ever walked into a new place and instantly wondered how easy it would be to defend it in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

You’ve probably had ‘the zombie conversation’ at some point in your life. You know the one, where someone says “What would you do in the zombie apocalypse?” and everyone starts throwing out suggestions like fortifying their basement or rushing to the hardware store. Optimists will imagine a grand, undead-slaying urban adventure, whereas pessimists will be quick to point out that we’re all much more likely to end up as lunch. They Are Billions takes the ‘you’re gonna be lunch’ angle.

This is a brutally hard base defence game where you are expected to turtle at every stage of development, slowly creeping your base outwards and maintaining constant vigilance. If you make a mistake and a zombie gets somewhere they shouldn’t, they’ll promptly infect half your base and doom your run. There’s no quicksave, no winding it back, and no mercy. Learn how to pace your expansion, get smart with your unit micro, or be overrun.

Though TaB is brutally demanding, it’s ironically more accessible than many RTS games. That’s because it has the option to pause - which I suppose means that it isn’t an RTS at all, as the ‘real-time’ part is optional. With a pause button, you can take all the time in the world to plan out your base or respond to enemies. If you love challenging RTS games but hate high APM requirements, this might hit a sweet spot for you.

Outside of that small target audience, They Are Billions struggles to impress. The steampunk visual style is painfully generic and the writing flat and awkward. Most egregiously, the main campaign is just terribly designed. A poorly balanced tech tree, only three mission types (two of which suck), and a total lack of interesting narrative suck all the fun out of things.

Ultimately, I decided to give They Are Billions the thumbs down because I felt that it lacked crucial variety. It’s more of a puzzle game than the strategy game it appears to be. There’s no room for flexibility or experimentation in the build order, and you either figure out the correct choices and approaches or you get eaten over and over. It’s just too brutal, and far too willing to take away all of your progress at the drop of a hat.

If you’re a die-hard genre fan and you have the fortitude to lose 4-hour long games regularly for reasons that feel unfair, you’ll be very satisfied with this product. Everyone else should steer clear.

I don't game as much as I like anymore, but I am addicted to this game. They really made a fun/challenging game that is addictive. I hope to God we get a Sequel. This is my favorite game that I've played this year and it's been in my backlog for a while now.

One of the best games of the kind I like to play which I've had the good fortune to try out. Like a polished hidden gem. Challenging, entertaining, rewarding and engrossing. Good graphics, sound, music and concept, well constructed.

Ive played countless hours of RTS games and this does amazing at giving the ability to build endlessly and kill endless amounts of zombies. Its a super challenging game and wish the campaign had a bit more meat to it. Only thing that would help get this game to the next level is a multiplayer function to give ability to withstand the hardest of difficulties. Looking forward to more expansions of this project but seems to have stalled as of yet. Keep up with more content in this game, great start lots of potential, need multiplayer action and this can really expand.

If you told me "Would you want starcraft style zombie survival game" Id say yes immediately. If you told me it was a steampunk styled 40k, Id get excited.

But its all the little thing inbtween that ruin this game for me. I never feel like I'm the smarter player for how I dealt with the zombies, but rather more focused on mircoing my economy, which this game punishes you for because if you are focus ing on something, that's when one zombie gets in and kills your entire colony. And because there is no save function for you hour long battles it quickly becomes a game of restarting and trying again, which to add salt to the wound the game delightfully keeps track of if you restarted a battle or failed it.

Because all it ever takes is one and you never have enough of what you need to thrive.

Every zombie type doesn't feel like a challenge because the only problem it adds is more health or speed. And when those don't feel like a problem anymore to the game it just throws more at you.

Then I look over the units I'm trying to unlock and none of them seem that worth it and on top of that there isn't much variety in units or really even tactics. you kite, you barricade, you focus on choke points and in the end the game will just spawn in a bunch of sprinters to ruin your day.

Also while I love the stylistic choices, the emperor and empire itself doesn't come off as confident, but as a childish insecure fool. Not the man who saved humanity. He doesn't like you at the start and yet entrusts you with an important front of the war. He threatens you but realistically I'm just like you seem very tolerant of my mistakes.

I don't mind the difficulty if the game gave me more tools to deal with it. Instead it feels like I need to head over to the wiki so I can make my playstyle as streamlined as possible.

I want desperately to love this. But I don't.

Intense RTS that is worth the money if you're a fan of this genre. The only con is that it's ONLY SINGLE PLAYER; no multiplayer compatibility.

As many have said, this is really quite a unique RTS base building survival game and is a lot of fun to play.....for certain people. Here's the 2 must-have prerequisites to enjoying this game:
- obsessive need to constantly micromanage every single tiny detail
- ironclad mental able to withstand constantly losing 4+ hours of careful planning and base building and design to one STUPID !@#$%(#$% ZOMBIE that slipped into your residential area (or just be a huge masochist)

There are some very frustrating aspects of the game (such as the very crudely implemented patrolling which if you don't specifically set multiple steps around obstacles/buildings your units just get stuck running into the side of the obstacle, or the attack/move where all of your soldiers scatter to the winds when the button is clicked and run off in different directions instead of moving as a group and thus unless micromanaged constantly your 150 strong army ends up obliterated in 15 seconds, or even just moving units around in general because they all stay clumped together and block each others movements and thus when your army runs into an enemy only the front few that are in range start attacking while the back units just continue running into their backs doing nothing, or the rather poor map generation that is inconsistent and generates a lot of ridiculous obstructions and the semi-frequent inaccessible area, or the fact that the desolate wasteland is literally described as a "wide open unobstructed area with long sight range" but is instead completely full of useless 2 square cracks and cliffs and very very VERY rarely generates any kind of decently sized open area to build an efficient residential area out of) but as much frustration as this game has given me I have still played this quite a lot and likely will still come back on occasion when I need my RTS survival base building itch scratched.

game is just a waste of time if you play the campaign its against you always and something stupid always kills you and scoring system is horrid