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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2319 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you playing?

I tried They Are Billions, which sounded right in my wheelhouse: it's an RTS, but your goal is to survive the zombie apocalypse. You do all the usual RTS/4x things: build stuff, gather resources, and send military. But the implementation is rotten. But the game is just obnoxious, and not in the "sometimes RNGesus smites you" kind of way (although that happens to). For example, if you want to attack a zombie, you must right-click exactly on them (and they are not large). This wouldn't be too horrible but for the fact that the game will show you its health bar even if the clicking point of the cursor is not on them. This combined with units that will not do anything you don't order them to, and you have to micromanage your military like crazy. They have a command called "chase" which is ostensibly to go find some zombies and thin the herd, but since they won't retreat if they get overrun (will just stand there and die), this is useless. All this would be fine if there were one vector of attack, but since you're defending, you have to constantly jump everywhere while also trying to get your economy going. It's unreliable in terms of warning you that units are under attack, and worse-still, it so rarely warns that your base is under attack that I have to think this is deliberate. But one zombie wandering into your base can wipe you out very quickly: once it takes out a building, it automatically turns all the workers that worked there into zombies, so the destruction spreads quickly. If you lose one building with workers in it, you're done. The result is a super finnicky experience with an economy designed around expansion while everything else makes that colossally hard.

Oh, and it has some of the worst unit voice blurbs of any RTS ever, including your (female) rangers implying you slept with them the night before. They say something like "I'm still tired, last night was incredible" as one of their standard responses (I wish I were making this up).

That the company has decided to stop offering beta keys unless you do the $90+ tier means I'm unlikely to check in later on the development process.

That's about it. Occasionally dipping into some casual stuff on my tablet, although I also picked up the iOS port of Don't Starve since it is/was on sale for $0.99.





cgod  ·  2318 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's too bad, it looked like a cool game.

I guess I'll take it off my steam list.