Quarantine Zombies - Prologue

Four days is an honest length for a game that calls itself a prologue, and Quarantine Zombies - Prologue delivers exactly that: a slice of a longer campaign, free, with a description that says plainly it exists to give you "a solid look at the core gameplay, atmosphere and progression of the full game." What it can't control is what its own players keep saying in the review section underneath — that the checkpoint you're staffing looks an awful lot like one they've staffed before, in a different, much better-reviewed game, for a much higher price.

Four of thirty days, and what that buys you

The premise borrows its clock from the paid game it previews: thirty days until the U.S. Army arrives to relieve the checkpoint, and you're the last soldier holding it while your scientist brother is trapped further into a ruined Chicago. The prologue caps that countdown at day four, which is a sensible way to hand out a demo — enough time to see the checkpoint shift, a supply run, and an early combat encounter, not enough to spoil whatever the full thirty days are building toward. Reviewers who finish it describe roughly forty minutes to an hour of actual play, and one German-language review flags the obvious tension in that structure directly: "leider sehr kurz der Prolog" — sadly, the prologue is very short. That's not really a design flaw so much as the nature of the format; a four-day prologue that felt substantial on its own would undercut the point of a thirty-day full game.

Where the trial period does cost the game something is in the download. One reviewer notes the install runs to roughly 18GB despite Steam's own listed minimum requirement of 20MB of storage — almost certainly a copy-paste error on Stones Games' part rather than a deliberate claim, but it's the kind of storefront detail a shopper reasonably expects to be roughly true, and it wasn't, for a four-day taste of the game.

An inspection sim that decided to also be a shooter

The core loop puts you behind a scanner, running refugees through a screening process and deciding whether to clear them, hold them for a second look, or decide they're too far gone. That much is a familiar shape for anyone who's played a checkpoint-inspection game before. What Quarantine Zombies adds is the part its predecessor in the genre doesn't really do: you leave the booth. Between shifts you head out into infested Chicago streets to fight zombies, scavenge for cash, and — eventually, per the full game's description — earn enough to repair a car and arm yourself for a run across the city. Positive reviews single this out specifically: "it will at least let you go outside of the area to get some kind of combat orientation with the world," as one puts it, and another calls it "more action oriented" than the game it's compared to, going as far as offering an unprompted 7 out of 10 for the idea alone.

It doesn't always hold together in practice. One negative review describes a soft-lock bug where quarantining one refugee while a second waits for inspection can freeze the day's progress entirely, and several reviewers across languages describe basic instructions — how to inspect, what tools do what — as unclear on a first attempt. None of that reads as a broken concept so much as a rough one, four days into a longer game that presumably explains its own systems more gradually than a standalone prologue has room to.

The elephant in the checkpoint

It would be possible to review the mechanical loop on its own terms if Quarantine Zombies' own audience weren't so consistent about where they think it came from. Across English, German and Russian reviews, independently and without prompting from Stones Games or from each other, players name Quarantine Zone: The Last Check — a 2026-launched checkpoint-inspection game from Brigada Games, published by Devolver Digital, sitting at "Very Positive" across nearly 13,000 reviews at NZ$28.99 — as the game this one is built on. "It's a copy of Quarantine Zone: The Last Check with a story," reads one; "a copy of the ''Quarantine Zone: The Last Check'', just more action oriented," reads another; a third goes further and calls it "the 'We have Quarantine Zone at home' game — right down to the handheld xray device to look through clothing." That last comparison shows up in the paid full game's own review corpus too, not just the prologue's, which rules out a one-off coincidence.

None of that makes the checkpoint-and-combat hybrid worthless — a couple of those same reviewers still recommend trying it, on the strength of the added shooting — but it does mean Quarantine Zombies is starting from behind a specific, well-known, better-received comparison point rather than from a blank slate, and its own players are the ones drawing the line.

Performance, and a voice-acting problem the developer has already admitted to

The most consistent complaint by volume, in both the prologue's reviews and the paid full game's, is performance. "Horrible lag which seems to be tied to shadows and shaders," "runs terrible and I have a computer that can run games like Cyberpunk at 1440p high," and one player reporting the game maxes out at roughly 5 frames per second — these aren't isolated low-spec complaints. Steam's own listed recommended specification calls for an RTX 4060 and an i7, well above what a checkpoint-and-corridor shooter of this visual scope would normally demand, and several reviewers report trouble even on hardware that clears that bar.

The other recurring thread is the voice acting, and here there's a verifiable fact rather than just player impressions to point to. Steam's AI Generated Content Disclosure for the prologue states plainly: "Voiceovers for some NPC characters." One reviewer calls the result "AI slop" outright; a more measured English review says the voice acting "felt unnatural and took me out of the experience," while acknowledging "I understand this is a free project." Stones Games isn't disputing any of this — its own news post, announcing the in-development sequel, lists "complete re-recording of refugee voices, with AI voice lines being fully removed" as a planned update to the original game. That's a developer confirming, in its own words, the exact complaint its players have been making, which is a stronger basis for scoring the sound category low than repeating the accusation on its own would be.

What "free" is actually selling

Judge the prologue purely as a monetisation exercise and it's close to a model citizen: no purchases, no ads, no premium currency, nothing to buy inside it at all. Its job is to sell the paid game standing behind it, Quarantine Zombies - Contamination, which released 20 Jan 2026 and currently costs NZ$3.68 at 75% off its NZ$14.75 list price — checked at the same time as everything else here, and worth re-checking before you buy, since a discount is a snapshot, not a promise. At that price, trying the prologue and then deciding whether to spend under four dollars on the rest carries almost no financial risk either way.

The one place this honesty breaks down is structural rather than editorial. Steam's own storefront doesn't register the Prologue as a demo linked to Contamination's page the way the platform does for an actual demo build — it's filed as its own standalone free "game," with no cross-link a browsing shopper would stumble onto. One reviewer's complaint lands squarely here: "I downloaded this expecting a full free game, only to find out it's actually just a demo. That's frustrating." The title does say "Prologue," and the in-game description does call it a preview of "the full game," so the information exists — it just isn't surfaced the way Steam surfaces an actual linked demo, and at least one player read that as the game being less upfront than it actually is in its own text.

Final verdict

A 5 reflects a game whose central idea — bolting first-person combat and scavenging onto a checkpoint-inspection loop — has real promise and a small but genuine base of players willing to say so, sitting inside a build that its own audience, and the paid full game standing behind it, both currently rate as Mixed for the same reasons: lag that doesn't respect a strong PC, AI voice work the developer has already agreed needs replacing, and a design so close to a specific, far better-received competitor that reviewers keep naming it without being asked to. None of that costs you anything to find out for yourself, since the prologue is free and doesn't try to sell you anything once you're inside it. But going in expecting a rough four-day tech demo for a NZ$3.68 full game, rather than a finished experience in its own right, is the honest way to set expectations — and, per Stones Games' own public roadmap, the voice work at least is already scheduled to get better.