Quarantine Zone takes the Papers, Please style of gameplay and gives it a Zombie Apocalypse twist. You examine survivors as they enter your checkpoint, looking to see if they have any of the symptoms that mean they could be infected. If they don't, you send them through to your camp. If they have any of a number of "inconclusive" symptoms, you send them to quarantine and check them again the next day. If they do have symptoms of infection, you send them to a side chamber to be, ah... cured. Via bullet. Simple enough.
Quarantine Zone tries to expand on the formula is by adding a survivor quota, base management, symptom research, and base defense elements. For me, this is where the game's problems lie, because all of these extra things feel tacked-on with no depth at all. The quota, at least for me, was easily met and was basically just free money every few days, though I can easily see it becoming a complete nightmare if you're struggling to identify symptoms properly. The upgrades you can make to your camp are all either necessary additions that you'll have to unlock at some point anyway, boring upgrades that let you have more survivors/food/electricity/etc., while giving a (usually uninteresting) aesthetic upgrade to one of your buildings. The symptom research is just a late game mechanic that adds unnecessary complication to the gameplay by "researching" unknown symptoms that people will show up at your checkpoint with, successfully giving you a new symptom to keep track of after completion. Lastly, the base defense game is just a trivially easy minigame where you control a drone and shoot hordes of zombies as they charge at the gates of your camp, a minigame that I never even once came close to losing--so yeah, I need to emphasize the part where I said it was trivially easy.
While I feel like the game would honestly have been better without the unnecessary side content I talked about above, I still recommend playing it, especially if you catch it on sale. The core gameplay is solid, I enjoyed it while it lasted, and I feel like it didn't overstay its welcome. It was fun, and I don't regret buying it.
