Quarantine Zone: The Last Check Review - The Apocalypse Is Glitchy as Hell
Deciding who lives and who dies during a zombie apocalypse is stressful enough without the game crashing every time I try to save humanity.
I have always loved the idea of being the guy in the booth. There is a specific kind of power trip that comes from denying entry to a desperate survivor because their paperwork is wrong or, in this case, because their eyes are bleeding. Quarantine Zone: The Last Check pitches itself as Papers, Please meets Contraband Police in a world overrun by the undead. On paper it is my dream game. In practice it is a chaotic, buggy, and often frustrating mess that I somehow can't stop playing.
The premise is simple. You are a soldier manning the gates of a survivor camp. You inspect people for symptoms, manage resources, and occasionally shoot zombies with a drone. When it works it is one of the most engaging simulation loops I have played this year. The problem is that right now "when it works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The Joy of Bureaucratic Murder
The core inspection mechanics are where this game shines. You aren't just looking at passports. You are looking at people. You check their eyes for jaundice or infection. You check their skin for bites or necrosis. You pull out a thermometer to check for fever and a hammer to check their reflexes.
There is a tactile satisfaction to the whole process. Hitting a survivor in the knee with a reflex hammer and watching their opposite leg kick out, a sure sign of infection, never gets old. It makes you feel like a detective in a bio-hazard suit. You have to be thorough because the infected are liars. They will hide bites under their clothes or mask their symptoms. Catching a liar and sending them to the liquidation chamber gives you a rush of dopamine that makes the tedious parts worth it.
Tools of the Trade
The game does a great job of handing you new toys just as things start to get stale. You start with basic eyes and hands but eventually unlock UV scanners, x-ray machines, and thermal cameras. The body scanner that lets you see through clothes to find hidden knives or contraband is a highlight. Although I will admit that half the time I felt like a TSA agent on a power trip rather than a savior of humanity.
Managing the Miserable
Between inspections you have to manage the camp itself. This involves buying food, fuel, and medical supplies while also upgrading your defenses. It adds a layer of stress that keeps you from going on autopilot. If you run out of fuel the power dies and the inspections stop. If you run out of food the survivors riot.
It is a delicate balancing act that forces you to make hard choices. Do you spend your money on a better scanner or do you buy enough beans to keep everyone from eating each other? The defense sections where you pilot a drone to gun down waves of zombies are a nice break from the staring contest at the gate. Watching bodies fly in ragdoll physics glory after a well-placed rocket is pure, dumb fun.
The Shallow End of the Pool
However the management side feels a bit undercooked. Once you figure out the economy it becomes trivial to keep everything running. The upgrades come too fast and the resources are too cheap if you are even remotely competent at your job. It feels like the developers ran out of time to balance the late-game economy so they just let you become a god of logistics by day ten.
A Bug-Ridden Nightmare
I cannot write this review without addressing the elephant in the room. This game is broken. I don't mean "funny glitch" broken. I mean "restart your day" broken.
I encountered a bug where the entire screen would pixelate into an unreadable mess every time I opened the symptoms tab too quickly. The only fix was to mess with the resolution settings or restart the game. I had survivors with zero symptoms, I checked them five times, who turned out to be infected because the game simply failed to render the bite mark on their neck. That is not a "difficulty spike." That is the game lying to me.
Game-Breaking Softlocks
The softlocks are even worse. There is a known issue where upgrading your base before the tutorial tells you to can brick your entire save file. I lost three hours of progress because I was too efficient. The flashlight is currently bugged to be dimmer than a dying candle which makes night inspections a guessing game. The x-ray machine frequently fails to show contraband inside people’s bodies so you get penalized for missing a grenade that was literally invisible.
A Story That Forgot to Show Up
The campaign mode sets itself up as a narrative experience but it lands with a thud. You are promised a story about the mutation of the virus and the struggle for survival but mostly you just get a series of fetch quests and a binary ending.
You don't really get to know the characters. Georgie, your fellow guard, is just a prop who sits there. The "moral dilemmas" usually boil down to "do you want to be evil for money or good for no reason?" There is no real emotional weight to your decisions. When the ending finally arrives it feels abrupt and hollow. You either get on a helicopter or you don't. That’s it. For a game that wants to be a "story mode" it feels more like a long tutorial for the endless mode.
The Verdict
Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is a frustrating experience because the potential is undeniable. The loop of inspecting survivors, catching liars, and managing your base is genuinely addictive. It has that "one more day" quality that defines the best simulation games.
But in its current state it is hard to recommend without a massive asterisk. The bugs are frequent and severe enough to kill your enjoyment. The softlocks are unforgivable in a full release. If the developers can patch the technical issues and maybe flesh out the endless mode this could be a cult classic. Right now it’s just a cool concept buried under a mountain of jank.
6.0/10 A cool concept buried under a mountain of jank.
- Addictive "Papers, Please" style inspection loop.
- Satisfying tools and tactile gameplay mechanics.
- Great atmosphere and visual style (when it renders).
- Ragdoll physics make zombie defense genuinely funny.
- Severe game-breaking bugs and softlocks at launch.
- Invisible contraband and rendering issues ruin runs.
- Story is shallow with an abrupt, binary ending.
- Late-game economy is too easy to break.
Got a hot take on this? I know you do. Head over to r/neonlightsmedia to discuss it.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
