As someone who very rarely jumps into these Simulator games (especially ones that look like they were slapped together in about a month), I gave this one a shot because it was a day one release on Game Pass and, to my surprise, published by Devolver Digital. Sadly, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check ended up being the shallow and repetitive experience I thought it was going to be.

The upgrade systems were promising at first, but once you take a good look at all of your options you’ll see how bland they really are. The base building all just boils down to increasing your capacities for all of your different stations and your equipment upgrades are all pretty useless aside from a few. I skipped the large majority of them to beeline straight to the big base level upgrades. Why would I want to put 100 plus research points into building detectors that go off when they detect if someone is carrying zombie meat in their bags when I can just open the bags myself and see what’s inside of them in less than 3 seconds? Why would I upgrade my sensors to make a noise when they detect high pulse rates and temperatures when I can just see that information on my screen? The tree is full of these useless options that really don’t improve your gameplay at all.

With the way that they set up the base building in this game, I really thought it was going to have me make some hard decisions when it came to resource management. Unfortunately this was one of the easiest and most straight forward version of this system I’ve ever experienced. Unless you’re reallllly fucking up on the detection portions of this game, you’ll have more energy generated, food stored, and medicine on tap than you’ll know what to do with. As long as you just remember to refill all of the necessities by the end of your shift, you won’t actually have to worry about this system at all for your entire playthrough.

The drone missions felt really shoehorned in and were extremely bland and one dimensional. Once you get the final defense upgrade about halfway through the game, these encounters are a total joke and just feel like a big waste of time.

Up until the 3rd evacuation, I really wasn’t hating my time with the game. There was a good drip feed of new equipment and mechanics to keep things mildly interesting, but once you start your route towards that 4th evacuation all of it gets thrown out the window. It really felt like the devs just stopped trying at this point as you’re just put into a mindless cycle of inspecting the same people over and over again with the same tools. Even the daily missions start to repeat after awhile with some of the worst objectives in the game (”Kill 3 rats with a hammer, “Kill 3 zombies outside of the checkpoint”, etc.).

And then there were some quality of life issues that I really wish they had addressed before fully launching the game. I really hated having the pistol and syringes bundled together with the rest of the equipment because I always ended up using them accidently. You could probably piece together why firing a gun at someone that you were trying to scan with an Xray may cause an issue, but the problem with the syringe was that it was a very limited resource that you only really got refills with after you successfully pulled off an evacuation, and there are only 5 of those in the entire game. There are also a handful of textures that look way too similar to accurately figure out what you’re looking at. The regular bruises, red bruises, cuts, herpes, and zits all kind of just blend together after awhile and when you’re also asked to look for symptoms that haven’t been identified yet, you just start running in a constant cycle of doubting yourself which leads to either wasting your time researching something that you’ve already unlocked or mislabeling something and missing out on research points you could put towards upgrades.

If the base experience was disappointing enough, I did also run into my fair sure of bugs that put up their own walls around my experience. Character models would freak out in weird ways, the sprint ability would randomly just stop working until I went to bed, some research that I did would say it was successful but wouldn’t show any details of what I had figured out. The biggest one I ran into revolved around the contraband that people were supposedly smuggling into the camp. I looked through dozens of people during my playthrough and I couldn’t spot a single thing the entire time. When the metal detector would go off for people that weren’t carrying a bag, I would search with my Xray high and low and always came up short. Then I would see that penalty for allowing contraband through the check point and I would just throw my hands up in the air. One of the most frustrating elements of my playthrough for sure.

On top of all that, NPC and environments are ugly, voice acting ranges from mediocre to just straight up horrible, some animations are just non-existent, and I’m pretty sure that the key art for this game is fully AI generated.

While I certainly don’t jive with every game Devolver Digital has published, I’ve come to expect a level of quality and style from the titles that they decide to put money behind and Quarantine Zone: The Last Check definitely did not live up to them.

4. BAD