They Are Billions

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.

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.

🧟 "This game taught me the true meaning of fear. Also, never trust a quiet map corner." 🧱
They Are Billions isn’t a strategy game.
It’s a test of your panic threshold.
You’ll build up a thriving steampunk colony, admire your perfectly optimized resource lines, proudly watch your soldiers patrol the gates...
And then a single infected gets through one tent.
Twelve seconds later:
Half your population is zombies.
Your army is screaming.
You’re crying.
The music swells into “You messed up BIG TIME” mode.
You try to pause.
It’s already too late.
You stare in horror as your empire falls to Barbara, the Infected Peasant.
10/10.
🎮 What makes it incredible?
⚙️ Base-building is precise, satisfying, and endlessly replayable.
🧠 Every decision matters — your placement, your expansion timing, your unit composition.
💀 The tension is real. You know the final wave is coming. And you’ll never feel ready.
🎵 The soundtrack? Pure cinematic dread.
🤖 Art + style? Steampunk zombie apocalypse has never looked this good.
🔥 When you survive the final wave? You stand up and clap for yourself.
And then do it again. Harder. With fewer walls. Because you’re a glutton for pain.
Things I've learned from They Are Billions:
• Every chokepoint is a lie.
• Ballistas are my emotional support towers.
• A Thanatos a day keeps the swarm away.
• If the map gives you too much room to breathe, it's a trap.
• Saving the game won’t save you.
💬 TL;DR:
This game doesn’t just kill you.
It punishes arrogance.
It rewards planning.
And it delivers some of the most intense victories and crushing defeats I’ve ever experienced in an RTS.
🧟‍♂️ “They are billions,” the game warns you.
And you nod… confident in your walls…
Until they really are.
10/10. Would build, panic, and die again.
FOR THE EMPIRE. 🏰🔥

This game scratches a particular itch that is hard to find. It's a turtler's dream - Build your base, capture every resource you can and climb that tech tree, because the game knows who you are and it's going to throw everything it's got at you and you better be ready. And frankly you wont be ready and that makes it so much more rewarding when you succeed.

The killer feature of this game is (to my surprise) a pause button. If you're anything like me, trying to control hundreds of little units and navigating a mini map can get disorienting when the chaos hit. Being able to quickly pause to make some decisions and then unpause to see your plan spring into action is brilliant.

"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:
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.
Both game modes also have 2 problems:
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.
Conclusion: Only buy "They Are Billions" if you are interested in the survival game mode. The campaign mode is not worth the money.

I have a love and hate relationship with this game. I enjoy the game play, but with no save scumming, and how one mistake can lead to ruin, the game can feel pretty brutal at times.
This game is like a weird mix of RTS and Tower Defense. You gather resources and try to expand your base. Unlike an RTS such as Age of Empires, Warcraft, or StarCraft, you don't have units for gathering resources; resources are instead provided and gathered by buildings. Your buildings for gathering resources needs to be adjacent to said resource, unless they are farms, then they just need to be on grassy fields.
There is a bit of focus on min-maxing resource gathering. A lot of it is tile based, and resource gathering is affected by a square area-of-effect around the building, so say there is a position where putting your quarry will net 5 tiles of stones over and other location where you get 4 tiles of stone, you want to place it in the way to get more stones. Additionally you need energy towers which creates an aoe that supplies energy, so you need to continuously create those to expand the area you can build your base in, because every building needs energy. Essentially you want to optimize how you expand the base, paying attention to which resources is bottle-necking the expansion. Eventually you are aiming for a large army and a base that is well walled off with good defensive structures placed strategically at choke points.
Now zombies are generally littered around the map. Depending on the map there will be infected colonies which when attacked spawns a lot of powerful zombies. What you want to do is to clear out the map with military units, which will level up to veteran status when they gain experience from killing zombies, making them a much better version of the non-veteran basic version. As the game progresses zombies will occasionally attack in waves. This waves will get progressively stronger until the very final wave, which will spawn a huge amount of zombies from all directions.
Now one very brutal thing about this game, is that there is no save slots, at least for the survival mode (which used to be the only mode, before campaign was introduced). For every map you start, you can only save to quite and pause the current map, you can't save when you feel like you are doing well, and reload the save if things don't work out. I guess it makes sense for the kind of game play this game provides, but it can lead to a heavy feelings of time being wasted whenever you play for 1 hour plus only to get screwed over by something you didn't foresee. Also it is very easy on some maps to have a zombie sneak past your soldier and ranger patrol and break into a building. If you are like me who put buildings right to next each other, once a zombie breaks into a building it's over, you are screwed, because any building broken into will spawn additional stronger zombie, and those will quickly break into other buildings.
On the plus side, for people who are not amazing at RTS or tower defense player, there is a pause button, so you can pause the game, scroll around the map, and build stuff and send commands to units. That is a very nice feature to have for a casual like me.
Overall though, it's a pretty fun game. There is a something addicting about creating a nice little base, trying to maximize resource gathering, and sending soldiers out for zombie hunting missions. Just be warned, one single zombie breaking through your defense can be game over man, game over.
PS: F!#$ that cardinal direction. "They are coming from the West." See the skull symbol near the West side of map, position troops to West side. Didn't notice the zombies suddenly taking a detour to the South and aiming right for a weak point where there isn't enough defense. Nevermind I have freaking 40+ sniper deathball, This is like the 4th wave, and they just touched my houses.
What I want to say is the zombies are very smart for zombies. They know where you base's weak spot is, and they will aim for that. This kind of feels frustrating, since you'd expect zombies to be more random and just go for first thing they see. Which they kind of do, but the game definitely cheats a little when it comes to the zombie's' pathing, and will direct them to areas of your base that are weaker, at least from my experience. Get Good I guess. Still frustrating to see hours of base building and planning go down the drain.

Almost 500 hours I've played. Part RTS, part tower defense. Super addicting. Super hard. All it takes is one zombie to sneak in and destroy your whole base. You can spend 3 hours building a secure base but in the final wave have it all destroyed. I end up losing most games in the last day, but I don't consider loses a waste of time, but rather a learning experience. When I win, I move up the difficultly level and do it again. This is one of my all-time favorite games.