'They Are Billions' Resurrects Real-Time Strategy in Spectacular Fashion
There is perhaps no better example of a video game working in total concert with its title than Numantian Games' They Are Billions. You are the chairman of a fortified Victorian state nestled in the craggy foothills of a world gone bad. Survival is the only victory, so you prop up alabaster castle walls and recruit clockwork mechs and bronze pyromaniacs to hold the line. The enemy - a hungry nation of zombies rendered in the lumbering Dawn of the Dead sense - offers no quarter. They are fragile, they are brainless, but they fill every inch of your screen. The titillating glee of a perfectly executed Zerg swarm is part of gamer folklore, simply because it's both terrifying and hilarious to lose your shorts to the lowest unit on the totem pole. They Are Billions is, essentially, an uncut distillation of that feeling. You zoom your mouse wheel out to see an endless morass of zombies dotting your purview like pixels, and you know that you are truly, truly [screwed].
"For me the attraction lay in the concept of Pandemia - a disease that spreads exponentially from a patient zero, taking down a whole city while their citizens contemplate in horror how they lived with a false sense of security. This is the feeling you get in the movie World War Z, where the fortified city of Jerusalem falls under the horde of zombies piling up against the city walls," says Jesús Arribas, director of Numantian Games. "I always found amusing that no computer game had explored that idea, cities struggling to survive after a zombie apocalypse. That is the cornerstone of They Are Billions."
Today, the game caps out at 20,000 zombies, which Arribas says is a soft lock to make sure all computers can run the software without self-combusting. Please trust us when we say 20,000 can absolutely feel like a billion when you're in the thick of it. The rest of the world seems to agree ... being the 9th most trafficked game on Twitch.
It's a trend that reminds me of Darkest Dungeon, another hard-as-nails indie strategy game that caught on without any support from a major publisher. Darkest Dungeon revealed the perverse joy in watching a streamer's meticulous raiding party die a silent, cruel death in the catacombs of a godforsaken mansion. Frankly, that schadenfreude is even more spectacular in They Are Billions.
One of the things I appreciate about They Are Billions is how effectively it resurrects traditional real-time strategy, or RTS, mechanics. This is a game with build orders, macro unit management, dovetailing tech trees and nervy resource allocation. The cynic in me believes that the reason we haven't seen a new StarCraft or Command & Conquer is that the powers that be haven't established exactly how to monetize those paved-over mechanics.
"I think there's an entire generation of younglings that don't even know about RTS and that's helping spark interest in They Are Billions," he says, in an interview with Glixel. "Considering those new people think it's the new hotness, and not old and busted."
Perhaps he's right, and Numantian is about to usher in a second golden age of RTS. The games business is notoriously cyclical, and plenty of us are relishing the chance to paint rectangles over sprites again.
