Some games are just December games. When the air turns biting, I hear their siren song in my bones. They Are Billions. Frostpunk. Phoenix Point. Factorio. None of them are exactly what you would call a Christmas-y game. In fact, they're all pretty bleak and threatening in tone. But they're also amazingly comforting.
Just imagine: sitting down in your favourite chair, electric heat pad on your back, cat on your lap, mug of hot chocolate or coffee by your side. Legions of undead roiling at the gates, trying to break through your cosy little town's defences. Ahhhhh. It's Christmas.
]]>I’m fairly sure that zombies are the perfect video game enemies. They’re relentless, for one thing, happily chomping their way through anyone who gets in their path. The undead are faceless as well, so you don’t feel too bad about escorting them back to their graves. Yet they can be poignant, dramatic reminders of friends and family that meant a lot to characters too, depending on who the shambling corpse used to be. If I was going to hire any enemy for a game, I’d hire a zombie. Then they’d eat my brain. That’s why I hired them! So to celebrate our very iconic, vitality-challenged friends, I've put together a list of my favourite zombie games.
]]>Strategy games is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring's hangover. It's the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not "mojito time", Geoff, put those away. It's time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It's unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space 'splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).
Okay, Geoff, now bring the mojitos.
]]>Occasionally, when I pause They Are Billions and zoom out on my tightly packed, grid-based steampunk settlement, I think about how the tiny families in the centre could have just as easily lived their entire lives without ever seeing a single zombie. There’s little in the way of a fixed story or characters in this survival strategy, either in its separate challenge maps or ambitious, flawed campaign. But there is a constant mood of melancholy, darkening the air like industrial smog; the uneasy feeling humanity died out a long time ago. As the saying goeth, you either watch your settlement get munched to bits by zombies, or you live long enough to continue colonising hell to extend the borders of a grim dystopia. Jolly good, then.
]]>Numerically hyperbolic survival-strategy They Are Billions has added a campaign mode, so we can finally find out why all these nice pale shambly folk are so hungry all the time. The New Empire, as the singleplayer story is called, looks to double down on the latent colonialist fantasies already inherent in steampunk, allowing you to ride your big imperial choo choo across the map and settle you some locations. The update also marks the end of eighteen months in early access, bringing the game to version 1.0. Look upon this trailer, ye mighty, and go "oh, cool, zombies 'n' stuff."
]]>Zombie RTS They Are Billions made a big impact when it launched into early access. Despite lacking a traditional campaign mode, it even inspired Conan Unconquered. Rather than bank it all on the strength of their horde survival, Numantian games are launching it out of early access in just twelve days, bulking it up with a story-driven campaign called The New Empire on June 18th. In it, players lead the last human city to reconquer their (un)dead world. They've gone all-in, and estimate that the campaign clocks in at a huge sixty to eighty hours long. See the release date trailer below.
]]>Zombopocalyptic steampunk RTS They Are Billions is in the final stretch of production, and developers Numantian Games reckon that it'll be done by June. Unlike many games leaving early access, they're not just tying a bow on it and pushing it out the door. Instead, they're bolting on a seemingly massive, branching story-driven campaign on to what is currently just a zombie horde survival game. In a big developer blog update today, they shared a shambling horde of details on the campaign's story, structure, how it differs from Starcraft or Age Of Empires and some Spanish screenshots.
]]>It's rare for strategy games to go all-in on their story mode, but the initial early access success of steampunk zombie RTS They Are Billions has opened up the chance for developers Numantian Games. In a big development blog post on Steam, they declare their plans to extend the game's stay in early access, with the scripted campaign mode debuting in its entirety on launch day. It's understandable why they'd need a bit longer, as they're now claiming the campaign will weigh in at an evening-devouring "40-50 hours of content", though they're not skimping on the other facets of the game.
]]>They Are Billions is the video game equivalent of spending time assembling some sort of mechanical thing - a rocking chair, let's say, with various interlocking parts. And then, as you step back to view your good work, the cat springs up onto it and, eyes locked with yours, lets loose a magnificent, four-tiered modernist turd right into the middle of the seat.
]]>Steampunk zombiefest RTS They Are Billions may not have a campaign yet (it's coming), but I reckon this latest early access update might be more important in the long run. Released yesterday, developers Numantian Games rolled out their Steam Workshop-integrated editor after a couple weeks of testing. Players can build scenarios both hand-crafted or procedural, with custom rules, complex scripting and new victory conditions. They also released a new official challenge scenario - even with reinforcements, can you finish your defences when the horde is only 50 days away?
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Set amidst a 22nd century rabies-like outbreak of Zed-ism, They Are Billions is a game about keeping your steampunk settlement alive while raiding zombie towns... and dealing with the repercussions. You manage everything from gold to oil as you handle a Left 4 Starcraft situation wherein zombies keep trying to pick off the citizens -- first in smaller numbers and then in screen-collapsing hordes. The game, which is still in Early Access, has just unveiled The Six Wonders: a set of end-game level structures that, if you can acquire the resources necessary to create, will greatly tip the odds in your favor.
]]>They may be billions, but so so far it's only taken a few dozen zombies to break through my defences in tower defence/RTS hybrid They Are Billions. That's a shame, because if I was any better then I'd love to take part in the weekly challenge run that was included in Friday's early access update. Every week you get one chance to take a stab at the same survival map as everyone else, then compare your score with strangers and friends.
Also added in the update are waypoint commands for units, a sprinkling of (habitable!) abandoned towers, and transportable explosive barrels - three things that every apocalyptic scenario can't be complete without.
]]>Well sound the klaxons, unfurl the flags, hoist your main-braces and petards whatever they may be, 2018 is proving far more interesting for charting Steam games. Of course we can't escape the three usual suspects, but beyond those this is quite the collection of interesting, independent, and novel games.
]]>Sorry to frighten the more sensitive reader, but, goodness me, among the miserably common entries, this week's chart welcomes a fair few newbies and indies! Are customers about to get better at buying? Or will we just see these games in the charts every week for the rest of the year? STAY TUNED!
]]>As the feedback loop of Steam successes reaches an ear-shattering scream, this week we see last year's best sellers dominating the New Year's first week. So I refuse to live in the past. Let's look forward. Let's imagine what we might want from these behemothic developers.
]]>Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. For the first foray of 2018, Fraser’s been trying to save humanity from hordes of peckish zombies and other undead beasties in survival RTS They Are Billions. It’s a classic New Year tradition from a simpler time.
They Are Billions, at first glance, looks like it might have been the result of a night of video game Mad Libs. It’s a survival strategy game with hints of tower defence, a steampunk aesthetic and waves of zombie enemies. It's a grab bag of video game tropes and genres slammed together that suggest there might be clumsiness in the way the whole thing hangs together. Thankfully, once the undead hordes start pounding at the gates, that suggestion is eradicated. And so, quite often, is humanity.
]]>Video games certainly went za-za for zombies a few years back, during a time when we could kinda sorta still daydream that the annihilation of the human race won't be caused by greed and hubris, but that's no reason to discount every game with zombies in it. Look at They Are Billions, an interesting-looking real-time strategy game which sends thousands of the shambling devils against you and your steampunk settlements. It launched into early access last week and slammed right into Steam's top 10, which is quite an accomplishment. Go on, let's have a peek.
]]>Ho ho hello readers! It's Father Christmas here! I hope you've all been good boys and girls this year! Now, let me see, what have you all been wishing for? Goodness gracious, it's all PC games! Well, I wouldn't know much about those I suppose, but let's have a look...
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