Tag: They Are Billions

Completed They Are Billions.
It’s a long game. The campaign is long by itself. Then a lot of the missions require you to spend an hour of real time waiting for that last wave of zombies. Then there are no saves, so if you die, you need to repeat it all over again from the very start.

The last mission is fun… until it isn’t. On one hand, there are a lot of choke points you can plan around of. But then on the other, it’s very long, and those waves are frustratingly hard to predict.

Annoyingly it is also crashed before showing me the final cutscene. Although it isn’t much of a cutscene anyway.

I’m starting to think that maybe I made a mistake rushing through the tech tree to unlock Mutant. More appropriate name should be Frankenstein Monster. It’s a powerful melee unit alright, but it’s prohibitively expensive.

Speaking of tech tree, some upgrades that sound amazing, like getting gold for each zombie, are actually trash. And some boring upgrades, like getting resources each time a train comes are amazing, because you don’t even need to build a mine to get Iron early, for example, and by the time you need iron, you’ll have a stock of it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reverse a decision once it’s made.

I was expecting the Mutants may be useful against other mutants and giant zombies (or are those zombie giants?). But no, it’s still more efficient to just whack them from afar.

The good part is see a literal wave of zombies break upon your defences. Haven’t seen anything quite like it since Starcraft 2, and here they took it to the extreme.
The bad part is that all the missions start the same, which just your HQ, so the first 10-15 minutes are just going through the motions.
The good part is that the way global upgrades system works, is that after every mission you get to pick at least one upgrade. The bad part is that some upgrades are just not very exciting, like +5 to the HQ sight range 🤷‍♂️
The good part, is that almost every mission has some idea behind it. Here’s a canyon, where zombies can come only from two directions. Here’s a peninsula, where zombies arrive only through a bridge, but in a huge wave.

And here’s a map that has no natural defences whatsoever, but you have plenty of time to prepare.

One great feature is that there’s a “roam” command for your units, that allows them to hunt zombies without micromanagement.
I don’t enjoy the fact that there are no saves in this game, as the missions get very long very quickly, and it’s easy to loose an hour or two of progress, because the last wave of zombies spawned where you didn’t expect it to. Same goes for not having the ability to speed up the game. I had to wait for 20 minutes for the last wave. Of course there are tons of fans telling people that if they need to speed up, “they’re playing it wrong”. I’d tell that those people need to get a life.

Thought it to be a tower-defence game, but it’s more of a standard RTS with some interesting mechanics. You’re fighting against hordes of zombies. If any of your buildings are destroyed, they spawn more zombies. And since most of the buildings are very fragile, this can quickly create a snowball effect. There are also no saves during mission, and the number of retries it takes you until you manage to complete your mission affects your score.

One mechanic I didn’t understand at first is that you can place your hunter cabins that produce food anywhere. Doesn’t have to be close to forest.

Some missions are just dungeon crawling with your hero. Those are easy and bring great rewards, but are boring as hell.