They Are Billions

In a market saturated with real-time strategy titles that have steadily lowered their barriers to entry, Numantian Games’ They Are Billions arrives like a bucket of ice water to the face. It’s a stark, brutalist departure from the genre’s modern trends, harkening back to an era when strategy games demanded undivided attention and punished the slightest misstep with catastrophic failure. This isn’t a game of incremental advantages; it’s a game of survival, where the only victory is a temporary reprieve from inevitable doom.

Set in a post-apocalyptic, steampunk-inflected future, the premise is devastatingly simple: build a colony and defend it from a planet overrun by the infected. The twist, and the game’s central technical achievement, is the sheer scale of the threat. Numantian’s custom engine, the “Zombie Apocalypse Engine,” is built to render tens of thousands of units on screen simultaneously. This isn’t a marketing bullet point; it is the core of the experience. The enemy isn’t a squad or a platoon, but a literal, flowing, all-consuming tide of bodies designed to exploit any gap in your defenses with the unthinking certainty of a flood.

While it offers a lengthy 48-mission campaign, the heart of They Are Billions is its survival mode — a procedurally generated nightmare built to break seasoned RTS veterans. The game eschews aggressive micro-management in favor of high-stakes macro-strategy and careful planning. You can pause at any time, and the design all but demands it. This isn’t about frantic clicks-per-minute; it’s about the cold, calculated geometry of base-building, resource management, and creating kill zones. It defiantly champions a style of game design many thought was long dead.

• Massive Horde Engine: The game’s custom engine allows for tens of thousands of infected on screen, transforming the enemy from a collection of units into a single, terrifying environmental hazard.
• Pause-and-Plan Strategy: At any moment, the game can be paused to issue orders, plan construction, and survey defenses. This shifts the focus from reflexes to deliberate, thoughtful strategy.
• Survival vs. Campaign: The game offers two core modes: a sprawling campaign (“The New Empire”) with a tech tree and hero missions, and the original, endlessly replayable survival mode on randomized maps.

They Are Billions is less a power fantasy and more a disaster simulator. The design aims not for empowerment but for a low-grade, persistent anxiety, and it largely succeeds. Every decision is freighted with consequence, and the game’s notorious difficulty is not a flaw, but its most defining feature.

The Anatomy of Defeat

The gameplay loop is a tightrope walk over a canyon of failure. A colony starts with a command center and a handful of units. The first minutes are a frantic scramble to secure resources — wood, stone, iron, and food — while simultaneously pushing back the fog of war. The map is peppered with dormant zombies, and disturbing a group too early can trigger a chain reaction that brings a premature end to the colony.

The true tension comes from the “hordes.” At set intervals, a massive wave of infected attacks from a random direction. The game gives a countdown, and the dread is by design. Early defenses — a few wooden walls and a smattering of archers — are laughably inadequate against the coming storm, forcing a constant, agonizing calculation: expand the economic base, or harden the perimeter? Invest in research for better units, or churn out more cheap defenders? Every choice is a trade-off, and a wrong one made an hour ago can be the single point of failure that brings the entire enterprise crashing down. There is no recovery from a major breach. Once the first zombie gets past the walls and infects a residential building, the infection spreads exponentially from within. It’s a brilliant, soul-crushing mechanic.

A Tale of Two Games

The inclusion of “The New Empire” campaign was clearly a response to player demand for a more structured experience, but it’s a curiously uneven affair. The campaign missions attempt to add variety — clearing out all zombies, protecting a specific landmark, or reaching a certain population — but they often feel like constrained versions of the more dynamic survival mode. Some hero-centric missions, where a single unit is controlled in an assault, feel particularly disconnected from the core base-building appeal.

It is the original survival mode where the game’s vision is most purely realized. Here, on a vast, randomly generated map, the narrative is entirely the player’s own: the slow, methodical expansion, the thrill of discovering a rich vein of iron just in time, the panic of a one-tile gap left in the northern wall. This is where They Are Billions shines. It’s a purer, more honest expression of the game’s core conceit, and for many, it remains the definitive way to play.

The game’s steampunk aesthetic is distinctive and well-executed. Everything from the Tesla Towers to the hulking “Thanatos” mechs feels grounded in a consistent, gritty visual language. The UI is functional and, for the most part, clear. Given the amount of information the game needs to convey, the interface does an admirable job of staying out of the way.

The real star is the horde rendering. A horde of thousands of zombies flowing around walls — not as a series of sprites but as a genuine, undulating mass — is the game’s central technical spectacle, and an engine built to handle that scale is fundamental to the experience. When defenses finally break and the wave pours into a carefully planned colony, the resulting chaos is both horrifying and, on a technical level, deeply impressive. A 2D-adjacent game of this scope is also fairly light on modern hardware by design.

On Steam, with a mouse and keyboard, the game is built for precision. The ability to pause and issue commands is perfectly suited to the PC platform. The fine control needed to place walls, kite units, and manage patrol routes is essential to the design. This is a game designed for the accuracy of a mouse, and it’s hard to imagine it feeling as manageable with a controller. The experience is fundamentally tied to the desktop RTS tradition.

They Are Billions is not for everyone. It is a demanding, often infuriating game that requires patience, foresight, and a high tolerance for failure. But for those who click with its brutal logic, it is among the most rewarding and strategically rich strategy titles of recent years. Numantian Games set out with a singular vision — an RTS defined by overwhelming odds — and executed it with confidence. It’s a brilliant, uncompromising entry in the strategy canon, and we recommend it with the clear caveat that its cruelty is the point.