Recent reviews by Baccoo

Nice little aesthetically pleasing futuristic city game from a dedicated dev that kept updating it throughout the years, great bang for your buck!

23/1/25 update: Ok, I'm too addicted and involved with this game to not recommend it and the developers addressed some of the issues I had with it, namely the controls, now more flexible in customization (looking at you left shift) and the rest I just got used to.
This game is definitely not for everyone: is difficult, complicated, vast, obscure, glacially slow and even a bit buggy but there's nothing else quite like it, it's 2 games in one, the space flight sim and the space strategy sim and seamlessly switching between the two is quite the gaming experience, no other space game offers such a wide range of things you can do.
You can get the base version pretty cheap when discounted, which is enough to fully try and enjoy the game so go ahead if you also like deep, complicated and borderline masochistic games.

Old Review:
While the concept is great and the scope makes this game unique for the amount of things you can do, the UI, the controls, the tutorials are so utterly atrocious that they'll make you rage quit this game. Even when coming back to it after having played 300+ hours months ago like me, it's THAT bad.

If you still want to try it, only buy the base game when heavily discounted and put at least 100 hours in it (half of which will just be coming to terms with controls and UI) before buying dlcs. I've bought them all and I decidedly regret it.

Hire a real UX designer and imprison the people who "designed" this overcomplicated, disorienting, basic information scattering and for the most part useless german bureaucracy simulator.

I tried very hard to get into this game but for the life of me, I just couldn't.
I can see there once was an actually fun and casually destructible open world sandbox here but at the time I played it (a21) it had already morphed into a braindead railroaded generic loot and shoot.

Even with mods I couldn't restore the game I wanted, the devs sistematically go for the cheap jumpscares in almost every poi by spawing zombies out of thin air and right on top of you or behind you, even if you just passed from there and there was nothing. So you can't use any stealth or methodical tactics, just brute force run and gun.

All poi spawns are scripted and always in the same exact spot so the game pushes you to memorize them through repetition. Repetition is the name of this game. And rush, you always have to rush rush rush on the hamster wheel.

And looting, though very important on the game, is so boring and obnoxius, just check out a gameplay video of people looting: 453 "loading animations" per second with their annoying noise, ad nauseam, forever and ever. Ew, I don't ever wanna see or hear them again in my life.

I know this is one of the most celebrated games ever but not for me: while the graphics, immersion and voice acting are indeed those of a masterpiece, the gameplay and game mechanics felt very luckluster.
Everything is scripted, clunky and/or bugged in a very immersion breaking way.
You can't find your own ways to finish quests or reach an objective, the game railroad you so hard quest items won't even spwan if you step 1cm out of line.
There are zero actual open world elements, even if the game tries to appear open world.

Great interactive movie, mediocre game.

Sadly, just below the shiny surface of this original idea and the return to monke factor there's...nothing. The game has absloutely no depth whatsoever and it turns flat and boring really fast.

It's almost like a polished concept demo, as if they had to stop development short for some reason, such a pity. I suggest not to buy it unless you can find it heavily discounted, you really like the idea of the game and are ok with the expectation of only playing it for a handful of hours.

Nevertheless, the game concept is really original so I hope they'll make a better, more structured sequel to give justice to its potential.

The game would be fun, albeit simple, but YOU CAN'T SAVE your game, and it's a very long and unforgiving game at that.

No room for experiments and creativity then, only stress and frustration: you're forced to play Ironman mode and waste several hours of your precious time because of the tiniest distraction, or even as little as a misclick at the wrong time. The devs gave the most patronisng explanations about this imposition, they have to force us to restart over and over, play only in the way they like for our own good, you see?

So, if you have limited time to play, don't enjoy wasting several hours in a second and having to repeat the very exact same things you just did every time you die I suggest you should stay away from They are Billions and buy another game instead, whose devs hopefully actually respect your choice and your time.

This is an amazing game, 100% recommended!

I'm reviewing the Evrima version here, which you have to opt for in the beta version tab.

The game looks very pretty (apart from some antialiasing flickering issues) and have the potential for some adrenalinic fun but in practice it rarely achieves that, maybe just 10-20% of the playtime, depending on how lucky you are during a particular session. The rest 80-90% of time is boring and buggy with several annoying parts:

- overall game design: barebone, very punishing game, very few features and you lose all your progress on death (hours of playtime lost every time), therefore hiding still in a bush for as long as you can is by far the safest way to grow and since there's a lot of thick vegetation you'll never even see most of the server population. If you think about it, it's just a bunch of dudes afkying in a bush in the background of their pc while they watch videos or even play other games to pass time while they grow, resulting in low or very low players interaction...fun, huh? Now, to be fair a few counters to this have been added to the game but they're still nowhere near enough;

- pitch black night (which seem to be longer than daytime, somehow) with a very narrow night vision on most animals. I get this is done for the horror factor but again, in practice it just goes against the enjoyment of the game;

- not well explained mechanics that will frustrate you (vomit, the pteranodon fishing);

- eating animations often freezing, not working and leaving you stuck for several seconds instead;

- sniffing revealing non existent, bugged food and sometimes not revealing the real deal;

- buggy server chart and server connection;

- apart from too much vegetation there are also steep cliffs hidden into it that cannot be seen at all until you're already falling and will instakill you with fall damage, again wasting you hours of painful growth;

- poor performance: forget about playing this game on more than 50/60 fps even on a good, new gaming pc. Good luck If you have a worse one;

- Weird, authoritarian like cult mentality on their official discord, the devs will try to convey all discussion about the game there, where they can easily silence and ban any unwanted opinion, critic, information while being exalted and worshipped by a lot of teen/pre-teen fanboys. Yikes.

- Glacial development pace, aggravated by redoing and reworking the same things again and again;

- Small roster, the Evrima branch is a few years old now but you can only play as 4-5 carnivores and 4-5 herbivores, which lower replayability and increase boredom. Path of Titans, a newer game, already have more than double that amount of playables.

- No mod support. It seems to me that the devs are afraid modders will make them look bad (and they're right, they actually did when mods were supported at the dawn of the game), on top of lessening the control they have on the game and its community (see the point above about the weird culture/mentality). Again, Path of Titans already have many mods that add more creatures, maps, playstyles, server options, etc. Come on now, Isle!

I could go on but I think this is enough, at least for now.

Kinda of buggy but deep and a work of love, the more i play it the more i love it! Rare things these days...plus, the genre is also unique and the setting is awesome and special: this game is a gem, don't miss it!