They Are Billions Reviews

The game is fun to play but quickly becomes very frustrating, even for a veteran RTS game player. Overall, it is barely fun in lower difficulties, and the higher the difficulties that offers a proper challenge are frustrating due to lack of QOL. [u]for single games[/u] The most upsetting point is the lack of loading save feature. A RTS in solo without saves is so stupid. The randomness of the spawning location, number of zombies and types of zombies of hord makes it impossible to addapt in consequences your forces and defense: you always need to gamble and hope that zombies won't attack your weak points because it would be game over after a 3-hour-long game. It is okay to be punnishing, but when it is because you always have to rely on gambles to win; it is very frustrating. A save feature would solve this problem instantly. The alert sound are broken, and sometimes the sound queue don't properly play while single zombie has sneaked by and attacked undefended strutures = instant defeat. The wonder buildings are broken too: you pay twice the price intended by the devs (once to reasearch it, once to build it) for mediocre bonus. Nothing will be fixed because the game don't have updates. [u]For the campaign aspects[/u] The campagn is poorly designed. Their are too much upgrades locked behind meta progression, some of it that are key and some completly useless. Choosing between a new building or unit without beeing able to try it first is frustrating when you realize that is sucks and you spent all your credits on it, and can't switch back to another uprgade instead. The No-build missions are awful. Those are so long, and you don't have much to do but hit and run because your hero don't have spells or special skills. Also, their are random pickups that are very hard to differenciate from the background but crucial for progression so you need to clear 100% of the map and hand over every detail to find it. Also the abscence of save feature makes it so much harder, for example when their are enemy that can one-shot your hero.

They Are Billions was one of my favorites! I came back after a couple years to get that "new game" feel back and was sorely let down. What did they do to this wonderful game? I cant even get a base up without a mutant aggroing on the first wave. Those weren't there before. This could be the lens of "nostalgia" but i feel like the map sizes are much smaller? Mutants being able to attack so early on and really having no map size to give you space at least before you aggro one has rendered this unplayable to me. Very Sad about this one. Guess its Age of Darkness from here on!

I would refund it if I could. The campaign is so slow and boring. You're just sending the same dozen archers around the map for an hour while you build the same six buildings over and over. There's no macro, no micro. If you love afk games, this one is for you.

It's interesting in the beginning, but then it transitions into a repetitive chore. The solo stealth missions should not be in this game.

I have really enjoyed this game. It feels really good to obliterate hordes of zombies once you get your town set up. It can feel bad to lose later in the game but I was always able to improve my strategy after each loss. It also feels very rewarding to beat a map after losing to it previously. I thought the campaign was good. The story is not really interesting but there are around 50 levels to play with a decent mix of variety and challenges. The Hero missions are slow but fine to mix up the gameplay. Only complaint is playing "wheres waldo" for all the bonuses. You also can't respec your research in the campaign and there are a few "gotcha" nodes which do NOT help newbies but sound good in the description. I think there should be an option for respecing so new players don't brick their first playthrough and have to start over. There are also some complaints with graphics, animations, etc. not being super good but I can easily overlook the downsides of the game for the positive experience I feel after beating each map. Overall, I give the game a 8/10. Definitely worth a try if you have never played a city building tower defense game. This one is truly special.

After playing the game for over 200+ hours and completing the whole campaign on the highest difficulty (800 % Apocalypse), my thoughts about the game are as follows: Pros: - A very fun and engaging gameplay loop; - Nice art style with well-designed maps, units, and buildings (except for Crystal Palace, which looks terrible, out of place and has an unnecessarily large footprint); - A nice and relaxing soundtrack; - A good variety of zombies and units, even though some are more useful than others; - The noise system – As your colony grows, nearby zombies will start coming after you. If you attack them too long from one tile, you generate too much noise and attract more zombies, therefore you want to constantly move your units in the early game and attack from different places. If you don’t pay attention to this mechanic on higher difficulties, you’ll have a very hard time; - The wave system – Every now and then the game throws at you wave of zombies. It's very satisfying and fun to blow them up; - The snowball system – Even one zombie can ruin your run. If a zombie infects a building, all colonists inside turn into zombies that quickly go to infect the nearest building, creating a chain reaction that's hard to stop. Although this can be frustrating, it adds urgency, excitement, and challenge to the game. Cons: - Obligatory Ironman mode – The game forces an Ironman mode on all players in all difficulty settings, even in the campaign (!). The game saves regularly and you can exit anytime you want, but you won’t be able to load the game if you lose. The devs even made the effort to perform game save when you Atl+F4. Players can technically perform their own saves (copying the save files from the game folder), but they shouldn’t have to; - Lack of proper tutorial – The game barely explains any of its mechanics, units, or buildings. Given the fact that there is only one way of playing the game (see reasoning below) this is a huge problem; - Poor unit pathing – AI pathing for your units is atrocious. Sometimes a handful of units can navigate through your town, but others get stuck. Also, unit formations are completely non-existent; - Building restrictions – You can’t build houses in a row more than 2+, you can’t place more walls than in a row 2+, you can’t place attack towers next to each other, you can’t place resource generation buildings in certain range of each other (you need to carefully plan building layout in such a way to get most of the resources available); - Confusing building health bars – Structures have 2 health bars (green and yellow). The green one represents the overall health and is important only regards to walls/watch towers. Zombies will never touch the green health bar of buildings, and they are incapable of destroying them. They can however infect them and therefore disable them – this is where the yellow bar comes in. The yellow bar is usually 10 % to 50 % of the building’s overall health and if zombie depletes it, the building becomes infected; - No easy permanent health bar toggle option – By default, you don’t see health bars of your units and zombies. This makes tracking the zombies wandering into your base very easy to miss. The game gets significantly easier with health bars permanently on but the option to toggle them permanently is not one convenient button – you need to keybind health bars to a number on your numpad, then hold the button and toggle NumLock; - Only one way to play – The game has a specific way to play it. It is solely a singleplayer game, you need to build the sustainable economy, expand and fortify the spawn/choke points. You can’t opt for any early game push, “tower rush” or other. Because of this, the game can get a bit boring after a while (it’s still the same); - Campaign tech tree – In the campaign, you get technology points to spend on upgrades and unlocking new units/buildings. A good portion of the tech perks are just basic things, that should be available right from the start or at least from the certain mission automatically. In other well-known RTS games tech tree serves the purpose to compliment or alter players specific playstyle. In TAB the tech tree is often times to make the game even playable in the first place. Since any of the tech choices you do are irreversible (!!!) it is absolutely possible to soft-lock yourself from completing any of the future missions. One example for all is “Farm tech” – it is undeniably impossible to play later than first 4 missions without farms (building that provides precious food resource 3x more than other buildings in the same category). I can’t fathom why this limiting “feature” is present in the lowest of difficulties for casual players – if you make bad tech decisions, all that remains is to restart the whole campaign (losing many hours of gameplay); - Campaign mission variety – There are three types of missions in the game: building missions, scout/hero missions and swarm missions. Every single one of the missions in any of the aforementioned category plays exactly the same without exceptions. The building missions have in total around 5 objectives: “reach x amount of population”, “resist all swarms of infected”, “destroy all villages of doom”, “reach a gold production of x”, “finish in x days”. No innovations or originality is present; - Campaign mission difficulty indicator – Each campaign mission gets a difficulty rating (1-5) meant to show how hard it is. Often it doesn’t represent the real difficulty of the mission (e.g. Lowlands rated 2 but is the second hardest mission in the game); - Campaign “scout/hero” missions – These missions, especially on higher difficulties, can feel a bit tedious as there are literally hundreds of zombies and you (most of the times) need to kill them one by one (!). The heroes don’t have any abilities to ease these missions, grenades are scarce and scattered. Completing these missions is often just question of time you invest in it (lots of kiting, shooting and pixel hunting most generic looking items on the ground), here and there the devs throw a curveball at you in a form of surprising superfast zombies (harpies) which can end your mission run in an instance; - Campaign “swarm” missions – Often the progression to any of the main missions is gatekept by swarm missions. Here you need to “plan” your defence for the incoming swarm. These missions require almost no micro (except few swarm missions – e.g. only giants etc.) and most of the time you just hurdle your units into one big blob and wait for the end; - Campaign loss count – In the campaign game tracks the number of tries it took you to beat the map. Doesn’t impact the gameplay (only victory points for achievements) but it is an obnoxious way to tell the player how much he sucks; - Campaign story – The story is barebones in the literal sense of the word. There are like 4 total monologue cutscenes with the emperor. The lore is almost non-existent, every map has like 10 lines of text of description and that’s it. Your units don’t talk or explain anything about the mission. Don’t expect any interesting or intriguing story; - Campaign’s last mission – The last mission of the campaign unexpectedly and without warning throws special zombie waves at you from a certain day. If it’s you first playthrough and you don’t know that a harpy wave is coming, you will very probably lose your first attempt at the last mission; - Insanely grindy achievements – “Infected killer level 10” wants you to log 100 million zombie kills, which would take hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours without specialized custom maps. Summary: The foundations are very solid. Unfortunately, the game is littered with poor design decisions that can often make you feel that the devs actively hate you. I still give it a thumbs up as I wouldn’t invest so much time into something I didn’t enjoy, but there is no way to overlook the multitude of flaws that significantly diminish the game’s overall appeal.

In theory, this game sounds great but in practice, it seems like the devs hate fun. Extremely unplayable laggy performance, no save mechanics, inconsistent hotkeys and very long campaign missions (where you're doing nothing but waiting for waves to arrive) creates an oddly disappointing experience. Additionally, the tutorial for this game and the starter missions are so long that by the point where you realize what's wrong with the game, it's already too late to refund the game. Don't buy this.

Great Strategy game for a cheap price. 100's/1000's of hours of replayability. Unique experience. Randomised free-play. Campaign that's totally difficult if you want it to be. Great time filler. Achievement hunting dream making you play in new ways. 10/10 imo.

Overall Good Base building and defence with a hero 8/10 -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)

"They Are Billions" has 2 main game modes. The survival mode works well and is addictive. 4 played hours feel like 1. Replayability is high because the maps are randomly generated. The campaign mode doesn’t work well and is more tedious than fun. There are 3 types of missions: [list] [*]Base building missions are like survival game mode, but on pre-built, fixed maps and often with long waiting times until the final wave. [*]Horde missions are just base defense with a limited number of units, which usually means placing your units and going AFK for 10-15min because micro isn't required. [*]Hero missions in which you control a single unit and have to retrieve an artifact. It theory it has great potential to bring variety and story in to the campaign mode, but in practice you spend 98% of your time killing and kiting zombies with your hero and 2% searching for items. This is simply boring. [/list] Both game modes also have 2 problems: [list] [*]Bad unit balance: Out of 7 unit types, you only really need 3, the other 4 are just nice to have. [*]Tedious base building: Finding space for your buildings can be a real pain in the a** because space is usually very limited and most buildings require empty space next to them for access. [/list] Conclusion: Only buy "They Are Billions" if you are interested in the survival game mode. The campaign mode is not worth the money.