They Are Billions

They Are Billions is a real-time strategy game built around a single brutal premise: a post-apocalyptic steampunk world overrun by billions of infected, and you with nothing but a command center and a handful of soldiers to stop them. You gather resources, expand your colony outward, chain up walls and towers, and manage a fragile economy, all while the map's infected population slowly finds the cracks in your defenses. The campaign mode gives you a structured progression with tech unlocks and narrative context, but the classic survival mode is where most players will sink the most hours. Pick a map, set a difficulty, and survive a final wave. Simple on paper, devastating in practice. What this game does exceptionally well is tension management. Every expansion decision carries risk. Push your borders too fast and you sweep up infected clusters you weren't ready for. Stay too cautious and your resource base stalls before the late-game waves hit. The infected aren't just a timer, they're a constant ambient pressure. A single zombie wandering into an unguarded building can infect your whole colony like a chain reaction, and watching that unfold across a settlement you spent 40 minutes building is genuinely horrible in the best way. The game earns its difficulty without feeling unfair, most of the time. There are rough edges worth knowing about. The campaign missions vary a lot in quality, and a handful of them lean hard on trial-and-error restarts because the mission conditions aren't fully telegraphed upfront. The RTS controls are functional but feel dated compared to contemporaries, unit pathing can be finicky, and managing soldiers under pressure requires more clicking than it should. The tech tree and building roster are solid but not enormous, so players looking for deep build variety might hit a ceiling after a few dozen hours. The Steam Workshop helps extend that lifespan with community maps and custom scenarios. The steampunk-meets-post-apocalypse visual style is distinct and consistent. Colonies look great when they're humming, and the infected hordes are genuinely impressive at scale, the title is not lying when it says billions. Performance holds up well even when the screen fills with enemies, which matters when a late-game assault can bring hundreds of units at once. The soundtrack quietly does a lot of work keeping the anxiety level high without becoming grating over long sessions. This is a game for strategy players who like their consequences permanent and their planning sessions long. If you bounce off punishing games quickly, the learning curve here will feel steep and the restarts will feel punishing. But if you find satisfaction in the slow construction of something that actually holds, and you can stomach the gut-punch of watching it fail, They Are Billions scratches an itch that very few games in this genre manage.

Alex · Scout Team

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