They Are Billions
A CITY-BUILDING SIM THAT MAKES ZOMBIES SCARY AGAIN ALEX SPENCER
PUBLISHER BLITWORKS / DEVELOPER NUMANTIAN GAMES / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £20.99/$24.99
your inhabitants safe. You don’t win
by expanding your empire, but by
staying alive for a set number of days.
It’s a compelling hook, buried deep in
doughy controls.
Whether you’re commanding units
or navigating menus, everything is
controlled via a mouse-style cursor,
steered with the left thumbstick.
Its movement is a little erratic, and
it’s annoyingly easy to overshoot
the building, soldier or command
button you were targeting, and
accidentally click the one next to it
instead. The control scheme is full of
obvious hangovers from the original
PC version, like the way you select
multiple units: holding down A and
dragging a rectangle over the area. It’s
like using a controller to edit an Excel
spreadsheet. Or trying to eat mashed
potatoes with a pair of chopsticks.Play dead
There are a few mitigating factors.
That wobbly cursor can be avoided
using controller shortcuts, although
these are consistently unintuitiveReal-time strategy
games have always
been an odd fit
on consoles. The
genre’s home
territory is PC, and
it’s never quite conquered the new
land of TV screens and thumbsticks.
But over the years, there has been a
push – most notably in the Halo Wars
games – to make the traditional mix
of building, managing and battling
as accessible on a controller as it is
with a mouse and keyboard. And now
there’s They Are Billions, an excellent
strategy game about surviving in a
wasteland filled with zombies – and
one which ignores all of that progress.
The game pulls in elements from
city-builders and tower defence
games to create a satisfying loop:
build up a little town out of nothing
and watch it happily chug along,
until a horde of undead turns up.
At which point you find out whether
all your preparations – walls, traps,
guard towers, patrolling soldiers and
the rest – have been enough to keep
- to access the building menu, for
example, you have to tap Y, then A,
then X like you’re pulling off a fighting
game combo – and the game does
very little to teach them to you. There’s
also the option to plug in a USB mouse
and keyboard, but honestly that just
feels like admitting defeat.
The biggest saving grace, though,
is that They Are Billions doesn’t play
out entirely in real time. There’s a
pause mode, where you can cue up
commands before unpausing and
watching them play out. This gives
you time to study, think and plan,
and, more importantly, offsets the
fiddly controls, because mistakes can
be undone before you accidentally
send your prize unit into the jaws
of a zombie, or spend hard-earned
resources on a workshop when you
wanted a warehouse.
The inclusion of pause means that
it is possible to master the clumsy
control scheme. And it is worth
persevering, because underneath
all the faff there’s a lot to love. Like,
unexpectedly, the zombies.
short
cutWHAT IS IT?
A strategy game
about defending
civilisation from the
undead horde.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Command & Conquer
meets Plants Vs
Zombies meets Sim
City, stuck in XCOM’s
Ironman mode.
WHO’S IT FOR?
Anyone who wants to
rigorously test their
plan for surviving the
zombie apocalypse.082 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE