If you were expecting Papers Please, but with zombies, then save your money because this is not it.
It's a somewhat enjoyable little game, though there is very little actual content and it offers very little challenge. I completed the campaign in about 9 hours, most of which is quite repetitive. At no point did I struggle to meet the quotas or fail any major tasks.
Some of the negatives that stuck out for me:
- There is no plot or story to speak of.
- There isn't much actual content and the game feels very small. After a few evacuations the game just ends. No other maps/locations, no base expansion, no new weapons, nothing.
- There is no challenge. Unlike similar games (like Papers Please) there is absolutely no time pressure. You can take as long as you want to check for symptoms. Most mistakes are made in a rush. With no reason to rush, you don't make many mistakes. There are also no conflicting priorities or difficult decisions to make - for example, person A might be infected, but I get some kind of reward if I let them in; there is nothing like this, a real missed opportunity.
- The game is essentially just made up of of many smaller minigames, though there is very little coherence between them. The night attack mechanic, for example, adds nothing to the game and what you do at the border in the day has no impact on it whatsoever (and vice versa). The base maintenance mechanic is also completely redundant as it's almost impossible to actually run out of resources.
- Fundementally, it's boring. For me, the last 1/3 of the game was not enjoyable; I just wanted to finish it to see if there was any more content after day 26 (there wasn't).
- The symptom catalogue menu is a pain in the backside to navigate to log symptoms, especially later on when there is a long symptom list. I'm sure the UI here could be improved in some way (even if it just shrunk the icons down so more fit on the screen at once).
- I encountered the occasional bug where a zombie would be walking around in the middle of the camp, with all survivors and soldiers ignoring it, and it ignoring them.
- The rats have no movement animations; they literally just slide along the floor.
- Bodies magically vanish seconds after you kill someone.
- You have the option to remove the hats of survivors to check them, but occasionally there would be a survivor with a hat that you couldn't interact with at all; I can only assume this is a bug.
In short, it feels cheap, rushed, and not very well thought out. There is a solid idea here at the core, which could have been great, but it has been poorly executed. Honestly, it feels like an Early Access game that is still a couple of years away from being finished.
