How long can you survive? It's so simple and so effective: build a base and protect it from the enemy zombie hordes. Not the ones milling about on the map, although they do trickle towards your base and sometimes with proper intent, but the actual hordes. When they approach they get a special announcement and a clock ticks down to their arrival, and a big skull represents them marching across the map. So much drama! When they turn up, you'll know why.

Zombies that are harmless in ones or twos are devastating in their hundreds, and if your walls and traps and troops aren't strong enough, and the zombies reach your vulnerable workers, they will infect them and the wave will get stronger. If you don't patch the hole quickly, zombies will sweep through your base like sea through a sandcastle. Dying in They Are Billions is an inevitability, and death comes quick.

But the difficulty is a masterstroke, as is the speed at which The End comes. Keeping you on the back foot compels you to do better, and dying quickly means you don't lose much, attempts are brisk, and you aren't overwhelmed by wiping the board clean and starting again. It also naturally breaks the learning into digestible chunks.

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