Zombie Cure Lab Review: Barely Playable in Its Current State

Zombie Cure Lab offers one of the more refreshing concepts in the crowded zombie game genre. Instead of mindless slaughter, it tasks you with building a research facility, curing zombies, and turning them into friendly, helpful “humbies.” It is equal parts base builder, resource manager, and light tower defense. On paper, it sounds like a creative and optimistic twist on a genre known for bleak repetition. But unfortunately, the Xbox Series X version feels more like an early beta than a finished product.

The problems start immediately. Even navigating menus on console is a clunky experience. Font sizes are small and thin, making them difficult to read from a typical TV viewing distance. There are no accessibility options to scale text, which becomes a real problem as the UI floods with data later in the game. For a strategy-heavy title, legibility is essential. Here, it’s a chore.

The control scheme fares no better. While it’s theoretically optimized for a controller, button mapping often feels unintuitive. Placing structures or selecting specific workers sometimes requires several more steps than should be necessary. During critical moments, like a zombie horde attack or power outage, the laggy and inconsistent controls are more frustrating than fun.

The core gameplay loop of building, researching, curing zombies, and managing your humbie workforce has its charms. There is a genuine sense of satisfaction when your facility hums along efficiently, with once-hostile zombies now happily operating machines and growing veggies. But that loop is undermined by poor optimization and technical issues that break immersion and, in some cases, wreck your progress.

Autosaving is one of the worst offenders. In multiple sessions, the autosave simply stopped working. Manual saves also suffer from a strange bug where every save is recorded with the wrong date and time, making it hard to know which file is most recent. In one frustrating scenario, the game crashed completely, and the most recent saves were either corrupted or nonexistent, resulting in an hour of lost progress. That kind of setback in a slow, planning-heavy sim can be devastating.

Performance problems extend beyond saving. As your lab grows and you manage more systems, the frame rate begins to stutter. Units occasionally get stuck in pathfinding loops or refuse to respond to commands. The longer the scenario runs, the worse it gets. There’s real tension in surviving a long wave or breakthrough event, but that tension turns into dread when the game begins to buckle under its own weight.

The concept is strong and the art style is charming, with colorful environments and goofy animations. And on PC, the game has had a more forgiving reception, with updates addressing issues over time. But as it stands on Xbox Series X, Zombie Cure Lab feels like an unfinished port that lacks the stability and polish console players deserve.

There’s a clever, lighthearted strategy game buried in Zombie Cure Lab, but this Xbox version makes it hard to enjoy. Between save system failures, UI problems, and performance breakdowns, it’s tough to recommend right now. With major fixes, it could grow into something special. Until then, this cure needs more testing.

RATING: 2.0 out of 5

Zombie Cure Lab is now available for PC and Xbox Series S/X.

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