Quarantine: Zone The Last Check Review. You Can't Skip It or Eliminate It

The zombie apocalypse theme in games has been done to death, but Quarantine Zone: The Last Check comes at it from an unexpected angle — through the daily routine of an ordinary checkpoint inspector. Even before launch, the game racked up over 1.3 million wishlists on Steam, and within its first week of sales it sold more than 500,000 copies, landing in the platform's top three bestsellers. The developers at Brigada Games combined the Papers, Please formula with a zombie setting, resulting in a small but gripping simulator about making daily life-or-death choices — though not without some noticeable problems.

The setup: a virus has broken loose, part of the city is already lost, and the player is responsible for the checkpoint the last survivors pass through. It's clear from the start that mistakes come at a steep price, and every decision made at the camp's border determines the fate of everyone already inside.

The resemblance to Papers, Please is obvious from the first few minutes: the same by-the-book procedural work, and a constant tug-of-war between empathy and cold rationality. The core gameplay loop revolves around examining survivors. Someone approaches the checkpoint, and the player checks them for symptoms before deciding: eliminate, quarantine, or let into the camp. Every five days, you need to hit an evacuation quota and transport healthy people to safety.

At first, a couple of visual cues are enough, but new diagnostic tools unlock over time. Symptoms are split into three groups: safe ones unrelated to infection; suspicious ones that might indicate the virus; and dangerous ones that guarantee the person will turn into a zombie. The reflex hammer is a good example: if the arm twitches on its own the way it's supposed to, or doesn't twitch at all, you're looking at a healthy person who can be let through. If the survivor strikes back at the inspector in response to the tap, that's grounds for suspecting infection and ordering quarantine. And if the wrong limb reacts to the tap entirely, you're looking at a future zombie, marked for elimination.

There's no time limit on examinations, so the only real enemy is your own carelessness or the temptation to rush through a scene. Let an infected person through, and a couple of days later they'll attack the camp and kill several survivors, costing the player a penalty and a missed quota. Get everything right, and the player earns money.

Later on, baggage inspection gets added to the mix: you need to confiscate banned items and eliminate anyone trying to smuggle infected body parts into the camp. Once a week, you have to defend the camp from a zombie horde in a mini-game — you take control of a combat drone armed with a machine gun, grenade launcher, and missiles, and fend off waves of zombies clawing toward the wall (also on topic: Vultures: Scavengers of Death Review. Retro-Style Tactics for a Zombie Apocalypse).

Closer to the midpoint of the campaign, a laboratory unlocks, where people showing unknown symptoms get sent to be eliminated for research purposes, helping identify new symptoms. A bit later, you also get the option to keep one test zombie in captivity there.

Side assignments help break up the routine — they're handed out daily, with cash as the reward for completing them. Find a specific person by description, confiscate a banned item, identify a cannibal among a crowd of survivors, catch a vandal spray-painting the camp — there are quite a few tasks like this, and they're exactly what saves the game from monotony during the first half of the playthrough.

Unfortunately, that balance falls apart by the midpoint of the game. Once the fifth or sixth diagnostic tool unlocks, every inspection starts stretching out to several minutes, and the line at the checkpoint doesn't get any shorter. At the same time, these checks don't add any depth or new decisions — just more buttons and more time spent on the same survivor. What was an interesting puzzle turns into a slog, and there's still a long way to go before the end of the campaign.

New daily assignments show up during the campaign's final week. We're asked to let an NPC through and hand them a specific confiscated item by the end of the day. In exchange, we get a short scene where they reveal a bit about the virus's possible origins. These assignments slightly break up the monotony of the final hours, but barely affect the actual gameplay: they don't add any fundamentally new mechanics, and the reward is limited to a bit of extra lore.

Camp management is simple and doesn't distract from the core gameplay loop. You need to keep track of four resources: free beds, energy, food, and medicine. All except beds need to be periodically restocked, and the buildings producing them can be upgraded. If you have spare cash, you can also upgrade other buildings to ease the routine — for instance, a gunpowder detector will immediately reveal whether luggage contains a weapon, while expanding the quarantine zone lets you hold more survivors with ambiguous symptoms there (more on topic: Best Survival Games on PC: 65+ Picks from Valheim to Subnautica).

Research points go toward unlocking new building levels, and each tier offers a couple of tool upgrades — like a color-coded indicator for critical pulse or temperature readings. Don't expect much depth here: base management works more as a set of small side tasks for variety rather than a fully developed layer of gameplay in its own right.

Moral choice is part of the game's marketing, but in practice it rarely lands with much weight. The characters almost never feel like real, living people: within a few hours, their lines start repeating, and any belief in the specific survivor standing at the checkpoint evaporates. Out of the whole playthrough, only one episode genuinely got to me — the story of a father and son, where the decision actually felt like it mattered. Otherwise, eliminating or quarantining a survivor is just one more action in the routine, not a moral dilemma. If you're into zombie games, be sure to check out our list of the best zombie games.

Besides the campaign, the game also has an endless mode. It unlocks after finishing the story, or you can jump straight into it, skipping the plot entirely. Essentially, it's the same daily checks with no new mechanics: no additional symptoms, tools, or events here. The only real difference is that each week requires hitting a random evacuation quota, ranging from 5 to 19 survivors, whereas the campaign's quotas are fixed.

If you start endless mode from scratch, the player immediately gets access to every diagnostic tool, but the base remains completely un-upgraded, and every infection symptom still needs to be unlocked. Because of that, a high quota can be a real challenge as early as the first week, though difficulty settles back down quickly after a few upgrades. After finishing the campaign, this mode simply lets you continue playing with every upgrade already unlocked, but with no end goal in sight, so its value entirely depends on how much you enjoyed the core gameplay loop.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, and its system requirements are noticeably higher than you'd expect. Visually, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check looks about the same as most small projects built on this engine: tidy, but without a distinctive visual style of its own. The sound design fares better: you can hear zombie growls, clicks and clangs from tools, background music plays, and character lines are fully voiced. If you want to check out games that push your hardware to the limit for the sake of a stunning picture, check out our list of the most demanding games on PC.

No serious bugs came up over the course of the playthrough. A couple of times, the tutorial quest failed to register if you went through it too quickly. Otherwise, the game runs stably, but it strains the system harder than some AAA titles. Your graphics card will definitely feel it.

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check has an interesting start, but it doesn't sustain its own format all the way through. If methodical by-the-book inspections are your thing, you'll get a solid, if modest, simulator out of it. If not, the routine and repetition will take over by the midpoint of the playthrough.