

I’ve had matches where everything was fine one moment and then 30 seconds later I was staring at a sprawling graveyard where my mini-post-apocalyptic empire once stood. This makes any breach in your base potentially life-threatening if it’s not dealt with immediately. Unlike your average RTS, buildings are placed automatically and build themselves according to various cooldowns, so you never have to worry about sending out villagers to do it themselves.

They need to be connected to your power grid, which originates at your village centre.īuilding Tesla towers extends this grid and allows you to extend your walls and go harvest resources farther afield. They Are Billions doesn’t let you construct new things just anywhere either. This requires you to venture outside the walls and take over new areas in order to continue growing. Maybe you build a bunch of houses to get more villagers to make you more money and who can cut down trees or mine rocks, but all of the sudden you’re short on food.įrom there you might go to build a new hunting outpost but realise you’re out of land. The latter includes things like gold, food, and wood, some combination of which are needed to build new things like houses and fisheries as well as protective walls and barracks.įocus too much in any one area and you’ll hit a barrier and discover you’re short on something else. In order to survive you need stronger buildings and better units, both of which require controlling more land and gathering more resources. While the object is to last a certain number of days as registered by an in-game clock, doing so is only possible by continually growing. These activities are the bulk of the game build stuff, kill stuff, build some more stuff, kill some more stuff. With it you can create new structures and begin expanding while also using a few starting archers and soldiers to scout out your surroundings and kill whatever’s nearby. In the center is your main building, the one that generates your starting resources and which must be protected at all costs. They just destroy, consuming everything in their path and converting your villagers and fighters into mindless brain-eaters along the way.Īt the start of every match you select a difficulty and then spawn on a random map filled with zombies. They can’t build anything, and you can’t negotiate with them. It’s basically the traditional skirmish mode from other real-time strategy games like StarCraft, but instead of facing a rival alien faction you’re up against a mass of zombies who launch attacks at various intervals. The mode players currently have access to is called “survival”. The game came out of the holiday season as one of the top sellers on Steam despite being in Early Access, and it doesn’t take long to see why. Every time a wave of undead obliterated my encampment, the only thing I wanted to do was restart and try again. While it might look like a reskinned Age of Empires, that surface hides a strategy game that strikes all the right balances. They Are Billions pits a steampunk village against a giant zombie horde.
