We Happy Few, new crazy indie title.

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 27, 2015

Compulsion games have announced their title: We Happy Few, a game they've been developing since early 2014. With a very special theme and artwork the game feels freaky and I'm eager to get more information! We Happy Few will be at PAX East 2015 with a playable "build" for anyone to have a go. Check out the trailer here, its crazy, awesome and I cannot wait to get my hands on it!

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Warhammer 40,000 announce their PC MOBA

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 26, 2015

Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 is at it again, Whitebox Interactive announce their latest game devloping Warhammer 40k: Dark Nexus Arena. Stated to have the heroes such as Space Marines, Orks, and the Tau in an assortment of four vs four player battles. Other races such as the Sisters of Battle, Dark Eldar, Eldar, and Chaos Space Marines will be added in the fullness of time. It is interesting to note the four vs four bat

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GTAV Heists releasing March 10th

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 25, 2015

Rockstar Games announced two updates yesterday with a date of March 10th for Online Heists and another delay for the eagerly awaited PC version to be released April 14th. Online Heists We are excited to announce that the launch of Heists for GTA Online is scheduled for March 10th. We know it’s been a wait, and appreciate your patience. Heists will bring a brand new 4-player cooperative gameplay experience to GTA Online, giving pl

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Steam now has over 125 million active accounts

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 24, 2015

Steam released a press release with the Steam VR.  GDC 2015 will mark the 13th anniversary of Valve's first public announcement of Steam, which has since become the leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux games and software.  In the last year, Steam added new services and features - including In-Home Streaming, Broadcasting, Music, and user created stores - as it grew to over 125 million active accounts worldwide.  S

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Updates and Fixes

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 23, 2015

Hello all, Thank you for your continued support, reports and emails about errors, bugs and features. We take everything on board and strive to build the best service for all.  We've been busy this last week fixing some glaring bugs involving: Landing page game art. Landing page graphical bugs fixed and load speed improved. Game Library now pulls games correctly. Footer layout bugs fixed. Subscription displaying incorr

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UK's first dedicated eSports arena: The Gfinity Arena revealed

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 20, 2015

Next month the UK gets its first dedicated eSports Arena at the Vue Cinema, Fulham Broadway London. Within the Vue Cinema, the Gfinity Arena hosts three custom-built stages with capacity to house over 600 gaming fanatics, offering the comfiest seats found in eSports. Get your tickets through the Vue website when they go on sale, and what a better place to take your special someone on a special date. eSports Arena to watch our f

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GamersGate celebrate 10th Anniversary

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 19, 2015

GamersGate are celebrating 10 years of trading with exclusive 48 hours deals. You can pick up Valkyria Chronicles, Company of Heroes 2, Defiance, and Tom Clancy's games for 50-75% off. We always like to see successful gaming ventures last a while, and we'd like to salute GamersGate for 10 years of -as they call it- awesomeness. Some cracking games ideal for co-op play, and some amazing rpgs.

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Grow Home patched

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 18, 2015

Grow Home has been one of those games that slips easily under your radar. You play as BUD (Botanical Utility Droid), a robot on a mission to save his home planet by harvesting the seeds of a giant alien plant. Sure, sounds a little... dry, but it's a great 3D platformer with charm, and taste. With the latest update: Some rare flora and fauna has been recently detected on the alien planet. M.O.M has a new side quest for B.U.D to inv

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New Colorblind Support in WoW Patch 6.1

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 17, 2015

World of Warcraft patch 6.1 has revealed that you’ll find a new user interface system that we’ve designed to assist players who have common visual issues related to colorblindness. In the new ‘Accessibility’ interface configuration section, you’ll be able to enable both text and color enhancements that may improve your visual experience while playing WoW. ‘Enable UI Colorblind Mode’ (which was pre

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ESL reveals biggest UK tournament for CS:GO and LoL

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 16, 2015

The ESL UK Premiership, the company's largest tournament since 2010, has been announced today for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends players to win £12,000. The tournaments will be spread over two months of online brackets to culminate in an offline finals at London MCM Comic Con over the 22-24 May weekend, in front of an expected 110,000 spectators. The first qualifiers are scheduled to begin on 23 February. Y

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Silly Stereotypes that Surround Gamers

Posted By: Melissa - February 15, 2015

When I opened my eyes the other morning to a pounding headache and an empty bed, I was instantly in a grumpy mood. Jordan had been out of bed for a couple hours, from what I could hear, his cough was getting worse. Now, I feared I was in the virus’ sights. Thoughts of having an excuse to make chicken soup would usually at least make me a little happy, but today would be a long day with no extra bandwidth. Sitting up, my fears were confirmed

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Why Super Mario 3D World might quite possibly saved my love life.

Posted By: Lacey - February 15, 2015

My husband doesn’t get me. I’ve known this… I’m a complicated stress ball of a woman and at times a bit demanding. Like any woman I appreciate romantic gestures or thoughtful gifts. Which is why last Christmas when my husband gifted me with a Wii U I was honestly a little confused. Please don’t get me wrong I knew how great of a gift it was! But I don’t game… I should have kept my confusion to myself

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GamerDating Launch

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

GamerDating has launched, congratulations and welcome to GamerDating.  To get started fill in your profile to reflect you, the person behind the screen. Hang up your gaming persona, because here we are all gaming fanatics, but we are people! Once you've finished filling in your profile (and remember the more detail, the more success), search the matching system for like minded people. If you like the look of someone, get in touc

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Why you need a picture

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

Yes, you will need to upload a picture of real-life you. Because you are awesome. Because you are beautiful. Because real people have real faces. Because relationships happen between people, not avatars. We created GamerDating.com with one goal in mind: to help gamers find other gamers to love them in game and out. To achieve this goal, we feel it is important that our community be made up not of anonymous avatars, but the amazing

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Ian's Story Part 1 - Success of Online Dating

Posted By: Ian - February 15, 2015

Hello, My name is Ian, and happily married to my wife Anne, whom I met through online dating. If you had of asked me some five or six years ago about online dating I may have scoffed at the idea and said it was for either sleazy men and desperate old women. However, times have changed and I now believe it to be one of the best ways to meat like minded individuals and some genuinely nice people. I've never been one for night clubs and

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Updates to come

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Hello, Welcome to our first version of GamerDating, we have loads of updates, changes and new features to add as we progress.  We will be fixing and updating any bugs, issues and features daily. During your time if you encounter any bugs, please provide as much information as possible with screenshots. Every bug you report which leads to a fix you can earn free membership and time on your account because we know communities grow

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Subscription Rewards

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Online dating can often be a long, daunting quest and we want to reward you for your valor. We are gamers, we LOVE games so we figured we could offer games for free in our paid subscriptions. This can do two things: Share and offer our favorite games Support and promote indie games, devs and spread beta access Regrettably the majority of offered games are for the PC, due to the nature of online keys.  We are always looking fo

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Albion Online - We came, claimed and conquered.

Posted By: Alexander Brown - February 14, 2015

We came. We claimed. We conquered. Albion Online is a Free-to-Play game in its alpha-testing stage which offers a cross-platform sandbox MMO on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Think of it as a living world with no NPC vendors, no questlines and no NPCs to report to. Instead you, your guild and your friends decide who owns what: it is an entirely player-driven economy with full-loot hardcore PvP. Towns, buildings and regions can all be co

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Mortal Kombat X will take more realistic approach to female form

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Female characters in Mortal Kombat X will be more realistically proportioned than in previous games.   "The mantra for this game has always been realism, heading towards a more realistic look," production manager Spiro Anagnostakos said, as reported by GameSpot. "So the same thing applies to the proportions where we try to bring things back in per se to where they should be." It is nice to see some positive actio

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Apple Promoting “Great Games with No In-App Purchases” on App Store Front Page

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Apple has started promoting games that don't have any In-App Purchases on the front page of the App Store. Currently featured in the UK App Store, the section is called 'Pay Once & Play' and it showcases “great games” that don't require users to pay for extra content through IAPs.   It’s been a long time coming for Apps to provide the old fashion, and simple “here is a game, now play it&rdquo

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They are Billions PS4 Review - Zombies will Zomb.

Posted By: Craig - July 04, 2019

Game

They are Billions bringing steampunk zombie apolcalypse to consoles.
 

Real Time Strategy games are one of those genres that I’ve always enjoyed but have never really been that good at. I’d panic at the first site of a Zerg rush, I’d play on Easy in Dawn of War, I’d absolutely never play an RTS online against another human and I’m the sort of person who would always use the car cheat in Age of Empires because I found it funny.

Yet I still love RTS. So now we’ve got that out of the way and you may be judging me a little (it’s fine, I get it, I’m judging me too), I can say this game was fun.

They are Billions is a steampunk zombie apocalypse survival RTS by Numantian Games and ported to console by Blitworks.

None of those words made me unhappy. Let’s break that down with some scientific memeology to explain just how that went in my head:

 

Cheers Vince

 

The game initially released on PC on the 17th of December 2017 through Steam’s Early Access program with a full release coming out just last month on the 18th of June.
However...

They are Billions has made its way onto consoles as well, and it is the PS4 version that I had the honour of reviewing.

Now I know what you’re thinking. An RTS, on a console? That’s madness. You need the finesse of a keyboard and mouse to get the most out of the game’s controls! (Not since the days of Command and Conquer on PS1 surely!? - Ed)

And you’d be right! But, the PS4 (and I presume the Xbox One, but I don’t own one so please do correct me) has USB ports which can read keyboards and mice.

Did I use them? Nope. Because I’m an idiot and wanted to see what a controller would be like... plus I couldn’t find my mouse. And let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. It felt sluggish to move the cursor and select my options. But it still worked. My troops still moved where I wanted them to and my buildings still placed in the right places, and everything still died perfectly fine when the infected hordes came to town…

I know my editor played They are Billions on PC, and he loved the controls as it simply worked for him, but we wanted to figure out if They are Billions lined up on PS4.

 

This isn’t what I meant when I said invite a few friends for dinner…

 

Now, for those of you who read my last article on here discussing Door Kickers (thank you, you’re too kind), you may recall I had a major gripe with the game about having nothing in the way of a tutorial or any means of explanation for the controls, leaving me to fumble around to figure out the controls myself. Well, guess what… They are Billions HAS NO TUTORIAL! It gives you multiple options on how to make the Survival mode easier (much appreciated) but no actual tutorial.

However, credit where due, there is an extensive Help menu on the title screen which does go into great detail to explain the way the game works and how to fumble your way through with a controller if you’re some kind of sadist who can’t find his mouse (hi, I’m Craig, have we met?). This was really helpful and left me feeling at least moderately prepared for the game ahead, understanding the purpose of the different resources and how the infection mechanics worked. Sure, this was a false sense of security as my first try at a Survival map had me chewed alive within seven minutes, but, learning curve. I got better. My second try I lasted a whole ten!!

(On the PC, this is no different. Part of the beauty and challenge, when I first picked it up, was learning how to survive for mere minutes! - Ed)

That’s not to say that this game is hard. Challenging, yes, very, but you can tailor the maps to match your play level very well, which is a feature I greatly appreciate in older RTS games so it’s nice to see it here as well.

Visually, the game is lovely. It clings to a grimy steampunk aesthetic without just going down the route of slathering everything with copper and cogs (copper cogs count double) and the sprites all hold their own unique level of charm between the Unit types; a Hunter looks like a Hunter, you can actually visualise these lithe, silent warrior women stalking through the woodland ready to kick ass and not be seen. The Soldier by comparison is much bulkier, much more armoured; he looks like he can take more of a kicking and dish out just as much. And this is just from tiny sprites!

 

Snipers gonna snipe

 

The game boasts 4k graphics for PC. Is this true for PS4? I’m not sure. I don’t have a fancy enough TV. But what I did get was crisp and definitely HD textures that ran very smoothly, especially when you had literal hundreds of infected bodies sprinting right for you. There wasn’t a single frame dropped, no lag, nothing, which a lot of PC purists would be surprised by I’m sure. See? We console scrubs can have decent frame rates too!

Gameplay-wise, as I’ve said, it is a learning curve and it is a challenge. This is offset somewhat by the game having the interesting mechanic of being able to place buildings and assign unit commands while paused. Now, this is not a new feature to videogames, it’s been around since Baldur’s Gate, but it is nice to have in an RTS. Also, there is a very nice grid mechanic when placing buildings. It shows you exactly how many squares a building will take up, and if it’s a resource gathering building, it will show you exactly where it can be placed when in close enough proximity to the specific resource. Again, this is nothing new, but it feel nice and is very helpful as a visual indicator.

There is currently no campaign mode in the console version of the game, only custom survival maps for the time being. But this is fine, as every game is different and you can make it as difficult or simple as you wish. There is also currently no sign of an online multiplayer, but there is the “Challenge of the Week” where you put your skills against other players across the globe and try to get the highest score on a pre-set map with specific rules and tasks to accomplish… I didn’t do well.

As for the units. I’ve already mentioned their uniqueness in looks, but they all play differently too. You start with the basic Hunters and Soldiers, and even between these two troop types you can feel the differences. The Hunters move so quickly, but they are squishy compared to the slower Soldier’s heavier armour and higher damage output. But even above them, you have the likes of the Lucifer, an exo-suit wearing, flamethrower wielding juggernaut akin to the Firebats from Starcraft. These things just tear through the hordes of the smaller infected.

 

Burn, baby, burn

 

You then have Snipers who have less armour than your Soldiers, but a higher damage output and a much longer range, so they make excellent support units. Then if you survive long enough and can afford them, you get my personal favourite, the Titans. These are GIANT FRIKKIN ROBOTS!! Ugh. I love me some hot Mecha violence action. You’ve seen Love Death + Robots? These are like one of those mechs off the farming episode and I absolutely love them!

 

Titans gonna….tite? (It's better than the alternative - Ed)

 

Overall, I can see myself sinking a lot of time into They are Billions. It’s an enjoyable game and as I’ve mentioned before, I’m stubborn, so I want to do better. Would I recommend it on console? No, probably not. While not unplayable on controller by any stretch, as I’ve mentioned before, it is a slower way to play and it will hinder you somewhat. Unless you have the peripherals to play it properly.

Would I recommend it as a game, however? Definitely. It has all of the familiar charm of an old school RTS with exciting survival elements and a really cool visual aesthetic. While limited in its current form, this game is constantly being updated with new features and gribbly infected to chew your face off. There may even be a campaign mode somewhere down the line for us console gamers, which will only add more longevity to this already fun game.

They are Billions is currently on sale on Steam for between $29.99 or £23.99 and I can only assume it will be available for a similar price when it becomes officially available for console purchase.

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