They are Billions: A punishing time waster

    

They are Billions is an RTS based on the surprisingly untapped well of rebuilding humanity after a pandemic ravages the planet and into your standard zombie apocalypse. The player's goal is to slowly push out the zombie hoards and build several settlements to reconquer the land in the glorious name of the empire. Battle through the ever growing ways and ever more dangerous enemies and secure the continent. A simple plot that doesn’t bring up any interesting questions or themes but sadly, no characters to enjoy.

They are Billions begins easily enough, with Emperor Quintis allowing the player to begin another attempt to spread humanity back onto their homeland. It is here that the first problem reveals itself, even if the player does not realize it till later. Quintis is the only character that speaks to you and that is only 5 times, at the beginning the game, after clearing a certain set of missions, and after the final mission; These cutscenes boil down to “good job, don’t fuck up.” Thus, for much of the game, the player is left feeling that they will be betrayed come the end of  the game, when there is no such twist leaving Quintis as a nothing character. The strange part of this is that the game grants you a hero unit, Calliope or Caelus and neither speak to the emperor in these cutscenes or give some characterization throughout the game. In their solo missions they have quotes like any unit but offer no opinion or perspective on the world around them. This presents a microcosm of the world, it has no character.

The world is empty so despite the several dozen hours one can spend in it, there is nothing drawing players in other than sheer spite once you have to replay the several hour long missions because of one mistake late into a run. There’s no positive reason to come back to missions because the campaign has no one but the dead to motivate you. Compounding this is the basic lore of ‘man seeks to use unethical means to cure one of the world's ails, and creates monsters that quickly destroy the world.’ The fact that one bit of lore points out that a major failing of the world was due to mishandling the ever growing pandemic is not lost on us in covid resurgent world.

Every level can take several hours, not because of content or developing strategies against the seemingly endless waves of zombies, but by the agonizing wait between resources arriving and making use of those resources, or, in the worst case scenario, having to redo the level from the very beginning since, for what I assume is an attempt to make the player focus an put more emphasis on their strategy and surroundings but comes off as padding, there is no checkpoints or ability to reload a save that isn’t at the mission select screen. The core gameplay of building your base, organizing your forces, and dealing with the waves of undead is hindered by the amount of down time that only serves to artificially lengthen the games playtime. A playtime that is further lengthened by the necessity of collecting 4 different resources in each map with the resources you need most being the hardest ones to actually obtain in any reasonable amounts before the heat death of the universe.

This annoyance gets noticed so much more due to a lack of variety in the story mode missions. There are three mission types, colony, waves, and hero missions. Colony missions have you establish a colony and maintain a colony while clearing out the infected in the area and/or waves of infected that will make their way to your base. This is your standard RTS survival mission without the ability to save, test out a strategy and reload if it fails. The levels function and have a fair variety of stages that can test you in slightly different ways but all boils down to the same core goal. Wave missions focus on you defending an outpost to help pave the way for the next colony mission or Hero mission. Rather than building a base and obtaining resources to build your forces the player is given a set amount of points, gained from completing missions and collecting specific treasures in hero missions, to spend on units, blockades and weaponry. Normally these are the checkpoints of difficulty for the game. If the player cannot beat these levels then that usually comes down to still having levels in the current are left to complete.

Lastly there are Hero missions. The missions have the player in control of their selected hero unit and are tasked with investigating specific buildings in order to retrieve a relic for the empire. These buildings are filled to the brim with the undead and emphasize smart positioning and splitting the massive hoard into more manageable groups. Along the way the player can obtain grenades and medkits to help and some maps even have units to help clear the way a bit better. These missions, upon completion, also help fill in the lore of the world and understand how it became the apocalyptic wasteland it is; despite presenting levels in which the hero can give some personal insight or fun commentary there's still just nothing, and that is the core issue of the game as a whole, it lacks anything else.

The game presents a solid system and a difficulty that will push the player in ways few RTS can do, but when given the opportunity to add to that challenge They are Billions falters and leaves the stage empty. It’s a solid game, but its choices to be so strict and empty leaves the player more frustrated than entertained very quickly. At its core it is a solid game with clear thought and care placed into it, but its niche is very clear cut and appeals to a different sort of RTS player than I am. If one can sit through the hours it takes to perfect a mission and do so on greater difficulty and numbers then this is an RTS that will appeal to them, but for more casual RTS fans it is difficult if not impossible to recommend.