An innovative cure for the zombie genre… that needs more trials
Zombie games are a dime a dozen these days, but every so often, one shambles onto the scene with a more unique idea.
Zombie Cure Lab from Aerosoft and Thera Bytes dares to flip the script and instead of mowing down hordes of the undead, you’re asked to roll up the sleeves of your lab coat and build a research lab in the frozen wilderness. The aim of this? To heal zombies back into society.
The game is a wholesome twist on the apocalypse that’s equal parts colony sim, resource manager, and light tower defence.
The premise is immediately appealing. After the world goes to hell in a hand-basket thanks to a sudden zombie outbreak, a particularly plucky team of scientists hides out in Northern Canada, determined to reverse the infection. Enter you, the player tasked with expanding the MOOSE Labs facility, rounding up stray zombies, and transforming them into semi-human workers charmingly dubbed “Humbies”.
Zombie Cure Lab has a setup that oozes potential, and the early moments are a genuine delight. Building storage depots, setting up chopping camps, freezing incoming zombies with snowball cannons and other icy weapons, there is a playful sense of hopefulness in watching your base thrive while once-hostile monsters potter about harvesting veggies.
Unfortunately, on Xbox Series X, that fun regularly hits a brick wall made of bugs, performance hiccups, and a cluttered UI that feels more suited to a mouse and keyboard.
A lab Worth Building – When The Controls Allow It
Moment-to-moment gameplay revolves around checking objectives, building facilities, managing your workforce, and keeping everyone fed, rested, and entertained, even if their TV is just a cardboard box. It is a classic base-building fare with a nice undead twist, with the defenses being set up so that instead of killing attackers, you capture them, cure them, and put them to work.
Controls, however, don’t do this concept any favours. Menus are dense with tabs and information, but font sizes are painfully tiny for couch play, and there are no scaling options. Assigning workers or rotating buildings often takes more clicks and fidgeting than should be necessary.
During tense moments, like defending your main storage from a zombie raid the fiddly navigation can cost you dearly, and has the potential to set players back hours.
Time To Earn That Lab Coat
Zombie Cure Lab starts off with a pretty detailed selection of tutorial missions. These missions set to give players a foundational understanding of how the game will play out. Each of the missions put players into different areas and has them complete tasks to get to grips with what the game is like, and how to play. This has players completing different tasks around one key section of the game, like learning how to build and harvest resources, develop a cure and defend the area.
Unfortunately, this easier, almost scripted, section of the game does seem to carry on throughout the later stages of the playthrough, with the scenario being very similar each time with little control over any and all challenges. It also has the mechanic of letting players advance and change locations, with this reducing any care in the created bases outside of “this can get me to the next point”.
It should also be noted that at the end of each tutorial section, the game flashes up a quick screen, with small writing, and puts you back at the title screen. The screen that flashes up can often be covered by other elements of the UI leading to a little confusion.
Bugs And Performance: The Real Infection
Technical problems further infect the lab life. In my time with Zombie Cure Lab on Xbox, the autosave feature failed more than once, leading to lost progress. Manual saves, meanwhile, sometimes labeled themselves with the wrong timestamp, turning simple loading into guesswork.
On top of this, when trying to load a save from the start menu, players need to click away from the search bar to the load game button and then back to the list of saved games with the D-pad. Then, to browse through the saves you need to use the thumbstick. None of this is labelled and was discovered through ‘button-mashing’ testing. The annoying absence of a ‘Continue Game’ button that loads the most recent saved game, is felt here.
Add in sporadic crashes, unresponsive building placement, and units getting stuck on invisible walls, and the lab feels less like a cutting-edge research hub and more like an experiment gone rogue.
As your base grows, so do the stutters and frame drops. The low-poly, colourful visuals and goofy Humbie antics make the world feel endearing, but the rough edges, from pixelated UI elements to occasional screen tearing, remind you this port might have left the lab a bit early.
Charming Idea, Rough Execution
Still, for all its rough spots, there’s no denying Zombie Cure Lab’s charm. Watching your team of humans and Humbies coexist is strangely satisfying. The layered systems, research trees, resource priority, defense placement can give genre fans plenty to chew on. If you can tolerate its quirks, the game offers dozens of hours of post-apocalyptic tinkering, multiple starting regions, and a sizable achievement list for those willing to cure every last zombie.
A Promising Zombie Cure That Needs More Development
Zombie Cure Lab is a refreshing antidote to the usual headshots-and-shotguns zombie formula, blending upbeat strategy and base building with a surprising dose of humour. Sadly, on Xbox Series X, it is also riddled with technical woes, awkward menus, and control hiccups that make curing the undead more frustrating than fun.
If you’re patient, or just dying for a new twist on the undead, there is a clever little colony sim hidden here in Zombie Cure Lab. But until the developers roll out some much-needed patches, this lab experiment might be best left on ice.
Important Links
Build a Lab & SAVE THE WORLD in Zombie Cure Lab – https://www.thexboxhub.com/build-a-lab-save-the-world-in-zombie-cure-lab/
Buy Zombie Cure Lab on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/zombie-cure-lab/9nt63l5drh50
