On its face, Steam sensation They Are Billions appears to be about three of gaming’s most-hallowed S’s: survival, steampunk, and (s)zombies. That, however, is all just window dressing. Truth is, They Are Billions is a game about failure, which is where all the best stories come from. Steam users have been sharing some doozies.
In They Are Billions, you build and build and build, but endless zombie hordes refuse to take the hint. The game exists in two liminal spaces: between RTS and tower defence, and between life and sudden, disastrous death.
We’ve been enjoying it a lot, despite repeatedly having hours of work undone by ONE DAMN ZOMBIE. Steam users seem to agree. Well, mostly.
Comments
7 responses to “They Are Billions, As Told By Steam Reviews”
The people complaining that they paid for something that is over so quickly obviously missed the fact that it’s early access and will have a campaign.
That, and you can only unlock other biomes by completing a match of the previous one.
My only complaint about it is that it’s pretty god damn stingy with resources and build orders and it’s absurdly easy to fence yourself into a bad situation where you can’t build anything that creates workers because you need workers to get the resources for it…
That, and expanding is very uneven. The cost of expansion is frequently too high for the benefit of expanding. One of the problems with procedural generation is it can just straight fuck you that way.
Playing on super-easy settings (long play time, fewer zombies) makes it a lot more forgiving an experience, but the resource-management is maddening.
I hear you and agree with you and I’m sure as the updates roll in they’ll be addressing them. I’ve only won a couple of times (one on 22% on the first map so I can at least have a go on map 2) and am constantly being drawn back into the whole pathetically hopeless situation and am finding myself learning new tactics as I go on but as you say the old RNG issue with procedural has me starting a map again if there are any issues with chokeholds etc.
Pause your wood workshops or your mining facilities. This will give you back workers to use, allowing you to build either tents/houses to get more workers or hunters huts to get food in a pinch. You learn those tricks very quickly, but it’s surprisingly easy to avoid those issues after a while, it seems to work on a rock/paper/scissors style balance.
I’m a bit mixed about the game. Heavily reliant on RNG for your base and it’s got a very odd pace to it….nothing happens and then everything all at once so you never know if you have enough until it happens.
Odd difficulty curve, you have to have done stuff before so you know what will happen and can prepare for it…rather than the pacing of the game forcing you to prepare as you go along.
If it wasn’t early access I’d say it was lazy game dev…hopefully they’ll improve the pacing/difficulty curve.
Bah everytime I see an article on this game I have to resist the urge to just grab and buy it…
.. I’m not one to buy early access everyone very damn good ones like these but the gameplay is just something that I’m a huge sucker for since I loved these kind of defence maps and used to do a metric boatloads of these with mates circa SC1 days =P
I’m sincerely hoping the devs manage to balance in a multiplayer co-op function as me and my mates would be all over this when it comes out!
Ugh, it’s been hell!!
This is actually the first time I’ve seen any negatives on the game though, mostly seem to be related to random resource and enemy placement, pathfinding etc
I might hold off a little longer…..but just a tiny bit.