Years ago, in what feels like another life, I was totally a PC gamer. Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem 3-D, Diablo, you name it. But I would spend most of my time playing Real Time Strategy games. Warcraft 1-3, Starcraft, and Age of Empires consumed most of my keyboard time. Once I switched to consoles, this genre fell to the wayside because there were few titles that I could play on a Playstation or Xbox. Blitworks has recently released They are Billions, an RTS for consoles, so I was eager to play.
A steampunk styled RTS on a post-apocalyptic planet that pits you against hordes of infected people trying to destroy civilization. It is up to you to rebuild society, protect your citizens and destroy the on coming hordes. All of this has to be done while managing your resources and making sure you can keep building, because the infestation will not stop.
Under the hood, this is your basic RTS. Gather materials, select jobs for citizens, build your town and defenses, then brace for impending doom. Except this isn’t a basic game. The steam punk theme allows you to build everything from soldiers that use bows all the way up to mechs. And every building will have to be powered, so you have to upgrade and expand you power grid to enlarge your settlement. And to toss a monkey wrench into the works if your buildings are attacked by the infected, they will not work until they are repaired – because the enemy will infect your world one building at a time.
Every time you play the game, you are placed on a newly generated map. This allows for a new experience each time you play. Will you get lucky and be surrounded on most sides by mountains, or will you be placed in the middle of flat lands with no natural defenses? This means you can have different resources at the start of the game that can come in handy. You can adjust the location, length of game, and the total infected population before you begin. The longer the game, the more time you will have to create defenses before the plague infested arrive. And if you are have trouble placing your buildings and organizing your troops, you can actually pause the game, but still manage all your resources. This is a great feature for those new to the genre.
This game was originally built and released on Steam, so the controls are designed more for the PC player. You can use the left stick of the controller to move a cursor around the screen, then buttons to select what you want to do or there are hot buttons that will open menus and allow you to use the D-pad to navigate them. But you will still have to use the control stick to highlight troops you want to move. After playing for a bit, the controls get a bit easier to handle, but are still awkward. If you have a controller that suffers from stick drift it can make this game almost unplayable.
The graphics are amazing done. They are a combination of dark and gloomy and the mechanically inspired steam punk civilization. Troops and buildings are well defined and easily distinguishable from each other. And nothing will prepare you for the utter flood of enemies that roll towards your impeccably built and designed town. The soundtrack will keep you on the look out for enemies at every turn. Deeply engrossing music that never detracts from the game.
They Are Billions is out now on XB1, PS4 and Steam. While the controls are best suited for a mouse and keyboard, this is a great option for console players that are looking for a RTS survival game, but don’t have a PC to run it. You will spend hours fending off the infected and hoping that you can rebuild society.
