They Are Billions

I bought this game at the moment the new campaign update dropped on Steam. I was waiting for a real RTS campaign with an epic campaign as it was advertised by the devs. So what can I say. This is really a mixed bag. The game is good in its survival mode, basically a defensive RTS game. But the campaign is utterly abysmal. There is no story line whatsoever. Missions are generic and repetitive. Basically if you played the first mission you already played them all. Its always the same. Every campaign map starts with this build order: tent, tent, tent, fishery or hunter; rinse and repeat. The so called hero missions are always the same. Clear the level, pick up all the points that you need for research and that's it. Nothing story related. Also heroes are basically just regular units with a bigger gun, etc. They don't have special abilities or powers. I just can't make myself play it anymore. The campaign is just so utterly boring. Why is there no story from the zombie side, maybe from the scientist from the old world who probably created it? I don't know it could have been so much more. But you basically never see anything new in the game. What you see in survival mode, that's it. Just marginally different skirmish maps in the campaign without any story. I really don't know what went wrong here. Its as if developers never played RTS campaigns before. Looking at epic campaigns from Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, C&C games, Emperor: Battle for Dune, Stronghold 1, Supreme Commander games, Dune 2000, Starcraft 1+2 and countless others I can't get why this has just simple skirmish maps without story. Its basically another 8-bit Armies, 8-bit Heroes, 8-bit Invaders. The only difference is that your enemies are the zombies and you have to defend all the time. If you are on the fence for buying this game look at the review from Worthabuy it clearly shows the problems with this game: https://youtu.be/zWwGukmPYGw 2 stars for a good survival mode. -3 stars for lack of campaign.

There is a single tech tree that spans all the missions of the campaign and you slowly unlock research points. The problem is there is no skill tree reset, and by the 5th mission in, if you made bad choices then you are screwed and have to restart the WHOLE CAMPAIGN over again. Not just the mission, the entire campaign. One of the developers has a draconian stance on modding and locks/encrypts files (work arounds available, but its a pain in the arsh). The game could be good, but there appears to be a headstrong developer unwilling to listen to feedback.

I'm seeing quite a lot of negative reviews here due to the state the campaign released in a couple of months ago. And although most of the points mentioned are totally correct and the campaign is dissapointing compared to what came before, the survival mode itself is such a unique RTS experience that I think it's easily worth the admission price alone. I spent well over a hundred hours in the game and finished it on the highest difficulties before the campaign was even out. Players start out with just a HQ building, 4 basic units and a few resources, surrounded by a horde of zombies. To claim additional land and resources for growing the colony, players must clear out the roaming zombies in the vicinity. You can't just apply brute force however, as attacking units generate noise and the more noise you generate, the more zombies will be attracted to your position. The whole game is a fine balancing act between growing as fast as possible to resist the ever growing waves of zombies, while not attracting so much attention as to get overwhelmed. It's a unique gameplay mechanic which I haven't seen in any other RTS before and is highly fun and addictive. Yes, you will lose many, many times before you will win a game on the higher difficulties, but when you finally do, the satisfaction is unparalleled. From a technical standpoint, the game sports a very impressive engine, capable of handling truely insane amounts of units on screen without tanking the performance much. Seeing a wave of literally thousands of zombies charge your walls, soldiers, snipers and automated defences mowing them down by the dozens is a cinematic experience all of its own. If you've ever watched the Walking Dead, World War Z or one of the other countless zombie movies and thought you could do better than the survivors in those worlds from a strategic standpoint, this game is for you!

This game has everything I want on paper. Resource management, city building, wave based rts/tower defense style gameplay and it's graphically pleasing as well. The problem is these things grow tedious when you are doing them over and over again. I've lost a many bases to what amounts to a few tiny pixels of a single zombie who happened to get it's hands on a farm or a tower. I've learned from very punishing small mistakes but I also lost my patience in the process. Most "strategy" in this game feels more like exploiting the game rather than playing by well written rules. Ultimately I leave this game feeling hollow. I wish I could enjoy it more after 100s of hours of play and dedication. Yet I can't escape the feeling that the premise on paper just wasn't delivered as well as it could have been.