They Are Billions on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
They Are Billions is a Steampunk strategy game set on a post-apocalyptic planet. Build and defend colonies to survive against the billions of the infected that seek to annihilate the few remaining living humans. Can humanity survive after the zombie apocalypse?
They Are Billions is a base-building, colony sim and strategy game
developed and published by Numantian Games.
Released on June 18th 2019 is available only on Windows
in 12 languages: English, Spanish - Spain, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Italian.
It has received 48,378 reviews of which 41,188 were positive and 7,190 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.4 out of 10. đ
The game is currently priced at 29.99⏠on Steam.
The Steam community has classified They Are Billions into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7, 8, 10 (32 and 64 bits)
- Processor: INTEL, AMD 2 cores CPU at 2Ghz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD3000, Radeon, Nvidia card with shader model 3, 1GB video ram.
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 4 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Minimum resolution: 1360x768, recomended FULL HD 1920x1080.
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
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 â 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 donât pay attention to this mechanic on higher difficulties, youâll have a very hard time; - The wave system â 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 â 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 â 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 wonât 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 shouldnât have to; - Lack of proper tutorial â 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 â 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 â You canât build houses in a row more than 2+, you canât place more walls than in a row 2+, you canât place attack towers next to each other, you canât 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 â 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 â this is where the yellow bar comes in. The yellow bar is usually 10 % to 50 % of the buildingâs overall health and if zombie depletes it, the building becomes infected; - No easy permanent health bar toggle option â By default, you donât 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 â you need to keybind health bars to a number on your numpad, then hold the button and toggle NumLock; - Only one way to play â 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 canât opt for any early game push, âtower rushâ or other. Because of this, the game can get a bit boring after a while (itâs still the same); - Campaign tech tree â 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 âFarm techâ â 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 canât fathom why this limiting âfeatureâ is present in the lowest of difficulties for casual players â if you make bad tech decisions, all that remains is to restart the whole campaign (losing many hours of gameplay); - Campaign mission variety â 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: âreach x amount of populationâ, âresist all swarms of infectedâ, âdestroy all villages of doomâ, âreach a gold production of xâ, âfinish in x daysâ. No innovations or originality is present; - Campaign mission difficulty indicator â Each campaign mission gets a difficulty rating (1-5) meant to show how hard it is. Often it doesnât represent the real difficulty of the mission (e.g. Lowlands rated 2 but is the second hardest mission in the game); - Campaign âscout/heroâ missions â 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 donât 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 âswarmâ missions â Often the progression to any of the main missions is gatekept by swarm missions. Here you need to âplanâ your defence for the incoming swarm. These missions require almost no micro (except few swarm missions â 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 â In the campaign game tracks the number of tries it took you to beat the map. Doesnât impact the gameplay (only victory points for achievements) but it is an obnoxious way to tell the player how much he sucks; - Campaign story â 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 thatâs it. Your units donât talk or explain anything about the mission. Donât expect any interesting or intriguing story; - Campaignâs last mission â The last mission of the campaign unexpectedly and without warning throws special zombie waves at you from a certain day. If itâs you first playthrough and you donât know that a harpy wave is coming, you will very probably lose your first attempt at the last mission; - Insanely grindy achievements â âInfected killer level 10â 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 wouldnât invest so much time into something I didnât enjoy, but there is no way to overlook the multitude of flaws that significantly diminish the gameâs overall appeal.
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"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 doesnât 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.
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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.
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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.
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It is a fine game, but there is no mid-level save. I'm a working adult and I have limited time and this is by far the worst decision. Just such a dumb decision. Bad decision. Bad dumb stupid decision. You can just manually copy and past the saves folder on your computer to perform your own manual saves, but I shouldn't have to. I decided to play through the campaign because I do like RTS games and zombie survival games and this is a pretty cool combo. I do love how easy it is to get swarmed by one missed zombie making it into your base. This does not work well with no mid-game saves. pros: - challenging zombie mechanics that make protecting your bases from all sides very important - zombies cons I would like to reiterate that it is a very bad, dumb, poor, stupid decision by the devs to not have a mid-game save. Like, the worst thing you can do in a single player game. Just so stupid. I thought that 1 hour in and I still think that 100 hours in. The unit path-finding isn't great, plenty of times units start walking into walls or buildings. It works out fine most of the time, but it can be greatly improved. The required spacing between buildings is such a pain. Like, houses should be able to be stacked and your units should be able to just walk though them. Spacing quarries and sawmills is so tedious and difficult to get "right" and optimize placement. There are Hero mission that only give you research points, you don't get to use a hero on the normal levels. I don't get it. It is an RTS, not a point and click adventure game. So there is a whole skill tree for your hero that doesn't affect anything in the main game. It'd be more acceptable to me if you actually used the hero on your missions, or if you could train a "hero-unit" that gets increased stats from your hero skill tree. there is no way to speed up the game. Most level require you to last a certain amount of days and I'm prepared to win and hold off attacks by halfway through. If I could speed it up or even skip to the next day, that would be so much better. Conclusion Its just a fine game. I'm not going to play it again anytime soon and its hard to recommend to anyone who values their time. I kind of regret buying it, but overall is a well made game. Just a lot of decisions made that disrespect my time. I wouldn't have spent so much time on it if I didn't just want to give an honest effort. and a last note: It is such a bad choice to not have a mid game save. Such a bad, bad, bad decision.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 15:10 |
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| Steam price | 12 April 2025 20:42 |
| Steam reviews | 11 April 2025 05:56 |
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Online players
1,619
Developer
Numantian Games
Publisher
Numantian Games
Release
18 Jun 2019
Platforms