Developer Numantia is named after an ancient Spanish city that was besieged by the Romans. AppropriateThey’re a tired videogame trope
by now, but the undead prove to be
the perfect fit for They Are Billions’
particular brand of real-time strategy.
For the most part, these zombies are
slow and relatively easy to pick off
but – as that title suggests – there
are rather a lot of them out in the
wasteland. And when a swarm comes
for you, arms outstretched, hungry for
brains, they’re much harder to stop.
Once they break through the defences
and hit your population centres, they
can infect your townspeople, who
immediately turn on their neighbours,
spawning yet more undead. If you’ve
placed homes too close together,
infection can spread like wildfire.
They Are Billions does the seemingly
impossible: it manages to make
zombies frightening again.
Eventually, an attack will target
your headquarters. If it falls, you
have to start from scratch, losing
hours of work in the process. But this
manages to stay fresh, because each
game generates a new map. Maybe
this time you’ll start right next to a
forest, making your lumberjacks and
hunters very happy, or surrounded by
rocky outcrops that create natural
bottlenecks to defend. Maybe your
recon party will find some helpful
resources, or an abandoned tower
that, if you repair it, will work like an
enormous bug zapper. It creates a
slightly different puzzle every time, so
it’s not just a case of finessing your
build order over and over.Zombie nation
It’s worth noting that all of this
describes the survival mode. This is
currently the game’s main offering: a
fairly bare-bones setup where you pick
your map and difficulty level, based
on the zombie population and number
of days you need to survive. At the
end, you’re given a score and dumped
rather unceremoniously back into themenu screen. This is the game as it
launched in early access on PC – it
has since added a full single-player
campaign, but there’s no sign of this
on Xbox yet or any word if it’s coming.
They Are Billions is as good a strategy
title as any we’ve played on console,
but it’s hard to ignore the feeling that
the game would really prefer you were
playing it on a PC instead. Q28 DAYS
EARLIER
They Are Billions isn’t
really the kind of
game you can pull
back from the brink of
disaster. Once the
zombies have taken a
chomp out of your
side, it’s often kinder
to put a gun to this
save file’s head. It’s
not the game you
loved anymore, it’s
one of them. Coupled
with the game’s
rather aggressive
autosave system, it
can often be
advantageous to
know when to throw
in the towel. Perhaps
by force-closing the
game so you can
jump back a few
minutes and try again.
Not that we’d ever do
this, you understand.“The control
scheme is full
of obvious
hangovers from
the PC version”
FAR LEFT As your
population
grows, you’ll be
able to elect
mayors, each
coming with
their own perks.
RIGHT The
setting is an
odd mash-up of
post-apocalyptic
and steampunk.OXM VERDICT
Hard to put down- but even harder
to pick up, thanks
to inscrutable
controls.
7
LEFT There might
not be billions
of them, but the
late game does
throw a lot of
zombies at you.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 083REVIEW