Off the Shelf Media

They Are Billions takes an interesting spin on the classic real-time strategy (RTS) campaign formula featuring a world fraught with zombies that can attack and decimate your base at any moment. The concept is a great one, and I’ll admit, I did have a lot of fun at times playing through this. However, the longer I played, the more I realized this game is extremely shallow and while there are no features that are extremely poor, it suffers from the death of a thousand cuts of bad game design. 

Gameplay: 1

The campaign of this game features several types of missions you take on as you continue your quest to colonize outside of the imperial city. You have your standard RTS objectives requiring you to build up your city, train up units, and take down strategic objectives on the map. These missions are the best ones by far, as the others are pretty bad and honestly a big let down. The early core gameplay has you managing several different resources of population, workers, food, power, and gold in order to get out of the early game. You need houses to attract workers, who can work key buildings like saw mills and quarries, which helps you to unlock better buildings and build more military units.

While this is all going, you start with a group of rangers, an archery-based stealth scout unit. You can choose to have them patrol around your base and defend from zombies or send them out into the world to discover key resources you will need later. This is a gamble as leaving your base defenseless can quickly end your run. The biggest difference between this game and many other RTS campaigns like Age of Empires II or Command & Conquer is that one unit can turn into hundreds in an instant. If one zombie slips by your patrols and walls, and manages to find your citizens, it will turn them into zombies who then in turn spread to the rest of your population. If you don’t have layers of walls and defenses to compartmentalize your base, one small hard-to-see enemy can wreck your hour-long mission. 

This leads to my BIGGEST gripe with this game. There is zero save functionality, and the missions can take hours to complete. You may, for example, play for well over an hour, complete several side objectives, and feel you are close to that final victory screen. All of a sudden, you look back at your base and a horde has formed because one guy got through your walls when you weren’t looking. The reason this happens so much is that the notification system in this game is terrible. You may get an alert about an attack and a small red blip on the radar, but it is nowhere near as noticeable as it should be. It’s very easy to miss and if even one enemy slips your detection, you are defeated instantly and have to replay the whole hour of gameplay you already did. This is a massive pain, as the first 30-45 minutes of gameplay is usually exactly the same, and extremely tedious. With that said, there is a pause functionality so if you do see an attack you have more time to react, but with the scale of the maps and art style being hard to view through at times, that won’t save you from this headache much. 

Another mission you see a lot features your selected Hero unit navigating through broken down fortresses and castles looking for ancient relics. It re-shapes the scale down to the unit level from the larger scale hordes. The level design is interesting at first, but after a few minutes, the tasks seem extremely repetitive. Enter building, open door, fight zombies, pick up objects. The objects you need to pick up also are not highlighted or clear, so you end up mousing over every single cell of a room to find the interactables you are looking for. The worst part goes back to saves or checkpoints not existing. You can explore the whole building for a half hour and pick up every little objective, but enter a room the wrong way and die and you have to do it all over again. The wonder of opening a door and being surprised is gone and you need to just repeat the same tasks you did before. And when you finally get to the end and pick up the relic, instead of being able to end the mission, you need to make it back out of the building. Now, this would be fun if there was a horde of zombies or some other change to the gameplay, but all the zombies are already dead so you just spend minutes walking out of these drab boring buildings. 

The other types of missions seem interesting based on the concept. Oftentimes, to enter a new area of the world map, you need to clear a zombie horde that is on the pathway there. They give you a tower to protect and a set amount of resources that can be spent on units and/or barricades to slow enemies down. The first time I played, I was focusing on choke points, really trying to create the most efficient killing zones to wipe out the hordes of zombies. It was fun, but then the more I saw of them, the more I realized you can just put down the maximum amount of your best unit with no strategy in a circle and they will kill off everything. It seems like a half-baked mode that lacks creativity and gets boring fast. 

Throughout all missions, you have the opportunity to research technology that can improve your gameplay. This ranges from new units, to buffs to resource gathering, and many other gameplay mechanic tweaks. The big plus I will give it, is that you can play around with the research tree without penalty. So if you invested in soldiers, and realized you would rather have the improved food gathering, you can un-select soldiers and re-assign your points. This is a feature I wish more games had, as I feel they lock you into a play-style and don’t let you explore different builds like this system does 

Story: 1

Deep down through all of this game, I am sure there is a story that some might find captivating. The issue for me is that the missions are so long, tedious, and boring, that the time between snippets of the lore of the world is so long that it doesn’t gel together. For starters, there was some sort of incident and essentially the world is covered with zombies, billions of them. Around 99% of the world’s population is living in this megacity that is inside of a crater and well defended from the zombie menace. You are tasked with helping to colonize outside of the crater and re-taking the rest of the world. All of your missions follow pre-existing train lines (that somehow remain unaffected by billions of zombies). You plop down a town center of sorts next to a train, and start colonizing. The empire feels like they just ripped off the Warhammer universe in having a giant empire with an all-knowing emperor who tasks you with spreading their empire to further and further reaches of the world. 

Now a disclaimer – I have only played a little over 10 hours of this game and about 5-10 total missions. I am positive that there is much to the main story that I have missed. However, the work that needs to be done to get to it is not satisfying and it’s so few and far between that it seems forced. It feels like a game where they had to sell it to people as “ It takes X hours to get through our story” and in reality the story is 15 minutes with hundreds of hours of filler garbage in between. 

Atmosphere: 1

I really went back and forth on whether I liked the atmosphere of this game and netted out on a 1.5/2. For the most part, it is a unique art style that features heavy on the green color scale that puts you in the odd post-apocalyptic mood. The art design on the buildings and world design is really cool and the isometric view of it all definitely gives a spooky energy to each level. The sound design is also pretty solid, where every zombie groan sounds like catastrophe about to strike your base, and leads to it almost being a horror game at times – if only because you are horrified of losing an hours worth of progress.

The reason I did not score this a perfect 2 is that there are certainly some flaws that hinder the gameplay severely. The zombies are not clearly identifiable from your own villagers, and that can cause panic as you think an enemy is right in the heart of your base when it’s just a colonist off to chop some trees. They also are extremely hard to see at times, especially as they emerge from the fog of war. However the issue is that they can easily sneak by your detection, as they are not clearly identified on the minimap and are hard to notice. The color scheme seems great at first, but after a few hours the colors all blend together and you can’t tell enemy from friendly units and just ruins the strategy of it all. 

Value: 1

This game retails at $30 however I picked it up on sale for $21. I would say the ideal price point for this game should sit at $15. The thing that is extremely frustrating about this game is that the potential is there for it to be an incredible genre breaking RTS that could stand the test of time. However, the lack of creativity in missions and art design leading to flaws in the gameplay really hinder it. It feels like there are dozens of little tiny things that every other RTS does right that this game does not even attempt to do, and leaves it feeling like a hollow demo of a game to come years from now. 

Duration: 0

Everything in this game related to time is abysmal. The missions take entirely too long and every step of the way feels like it takes time to add overall hours to the length of the game. So many games these days feel they need to have 100+ hour long campaigns for them to be good, and push annoying time consuming mechanics into the game to hit that. This game just repeats the same 3 types of missions over and over again, and each one feels like it was designed to be slow, boring and a waste of time by the end of it. There were times I found myself really enjoying parts of the gameplay, or getting into the story, and then some dumb mechanic ruined it and took me completely out of the immersion to spend more time replaying a mission or walking through an area I had already cleared. 

Total Score: 4/10

On the whole, They Are Billions sets out to do something new with a genre that is over-saturated and could use creativity. The stress of the missions and intensity of the battles are captivating and are the clear high points of the game. However, the countless flaws and overall disregard for the player’s time with the length of missions and inability to avoid replaying hours of the same content due to issues with the game design really drag it down. This game feels like the concept of a great game that could be a world-class strategy title a decade from now with proper changes and tweaks. But today, this being the finished product is a real let down, and I would not recommend picking this one up in its current state.