Quarantine Review

 Quarantine, is a turn based strategy game heavily inspired by XCOM that is guaranteed to have you slowly entering a love-hate relationship with it. With each passing turn you find yourself struggling against an endless wave of pestilence and disease. One infected city becomes two, and before long you lose control of the situation and of course. Game over.

As it stands, I do love this game. I enjoy the twists, turns and difficult choices you have to make as well as the careful planning that you have to put into each situation. However, the fate of the entire world isn’t in your hands alone. As you progress you will gain the ability and the chance to hire a variety of different types of workers to assist you. These can be passive, helping to decrease the time to research or assist in the construction of FOBs around the world. Other workers, such as security specialists can perform actions and interact with events globally. Sometimes you will need to quarantine a city in order to slow down the infection in order to buy yourself more time, or even send your security specialists to assist with controlling riots and aggressive behaviour as one or more cities slowly degrade into a state of panic and disarray.

Circling each of the cities is four bars, one shows that the infection has just started as the red slowly encompasses and surrounds the city, the bars begin to light up. One by one, before all four at lit and once that is done, The city is lost, the population crippled or slain by the disease which you allowed to run rampant and destroy the entire population.

Quarantine walks that fine line of challenging, where sometimes you can find yourself getting increasingly annoyed at how the game is. Other times? The challenge is fun, it makes you think and it makes you plan and consider your actions. Constant worrying about the results of your choices will be your ever-present companion and before long it will be an unwelcome acquaintance of yours. To me it feels like that perhaps the game is almost too willing to punish you, simple mistakes that can easily be made by rookie players can swiftly escalate situations to the point where you will be struggling very early on. To make matters worse the disease evolves and progresses, becoming stronger and more complex for you to cure.

I find the game to be rather interesting: A steady mixture of challenge and playability along with the sense that the game is afraid to beat you, offering you the chance to play again and try and write over your previous mistakes. A variety of different diseases, from viruses to bacteria each offer their own unique playstyle and each disease has its own abilities and preferences, some mutate quickly whilst others reproduce quickly and can infect cities in mere moments rather than days or even weeks.

The game seems to draw perhaps a little too much from XCOM, however, as after a few play throughs you often find yourself recycling the same tactics with slightly different changes. Often I am following the same research path and responding to infections in almost the exactly the same way, but perhaps this is just me rather than the game itself. It is hard to tell who is at fault here.