The awesome folks over at Blitworks and Numantian Games gave me the opportunity to don my goggles and top hat in order to fight off the ever-hungry hoard of the undead in their upcoming Steampunk survival game, They are Billions.
This real-time strategy city building game with a tower defense twist takes place on a planet that’s being colonized until a zombie outbreak occurred turning most of the planet’s inhabitants into an infected hoard and it’s not up to you to rebuild civilization.
This game is truly a twist on some of your more traditional tower defense style games as the enemies don’t exactly follow a route, they can come from any direction! Because of this I actually lost the game a couple of times.
Usually, I save the bad things about a game for the end of the review but I’ll actually get it out of the way this time as there is only one real negative thing I can say about this game as a whole. There’s no tutorial, yes there’s a help option in the menu that shows you the controls but seriously, a game with all sorts of complicated actions needs a tutorial at the start of the game or at least a training level.
With the bad stuff out of the way, on with the good! I’m a sucker for art in games and this one offers great illustrations and graphics, for a Steampunk game it could actually use a bit more of the aesthetics of the culture but overall it catches it nicely.
The sound effects in the game are decent and the soundtrack really fits what’s going on but be prepared to lower the volume as it’s pretty loud (headphone warning!). The voice acting fits the story well and adds to the look of the game.
The controls are a bit tricky as the game is obviously meant to be played on PC but after a couple of practice rounds I started to get the hang of it and I began to do a bit better than my previous runs.
Overall They are Billions is a fun game to play once you get a handle on the controls which is important for this style of gameplay. The lack of direction when you first play it can make the game a bit disconcerting but trust me when I say don’t give up on it, play around with it first and you’ll be surprised. The randomly generated levels truly ensure that no gameplay is the same and allows you to enjoy the experience over and over again. On my scale of five stars, it’s a 4!
