Fallout Shelter

As I type this my Dwellers are starving to death… help…

Fallout Shelter is the Fallout’s first foray into the world of Mobile gaming, and the first Mobile game I think I have actually reviewed, so this should be interesting. It’s a free to play Base building RTS/RPG type game that looks like what would happen if you brought nuclear apocalypse to the XCOM: Enemy Unknown base building mechanics. Can this game stand on its own and tide us over until Fallout 4? Let’s find out!

There story is essentially the same as other Fallout games. Nuclear apocalypse has happened and you have become the overseer of a Vault, a giant underground shelter that keeps people safe from the radiation and the wasteland. Your job is to keep your people happy, expand your vault and upgrade your dwellers until they become the best they can be. Placing you into the role of an Overseer is an interesting change as while you don’t get to conduct gruesome experiments like in the rest of the Vaults you get to look after your own set of people, you can even name them! This helps to make them more likeable and by personalising each of the dwellers to be family or friends it can help to improve your experience, considering there really isn’t a story per say.

It looks like a little ant farm!

The presentation is very simple but charming. Each of your dwellers are cartoonish 2D sprites that are all creepily similar to Vault-Tec’s mascot Vault Boy. These characters are rendered in a 3D background that fully models each new room you build and allows them to move in all 3 dimensions. It’s a strange look when you first see it but then you grow to love it as it allow you to see much more detail in your vault and the character sprites help to keep it simple and maintain a very familiar Fallout look. The wasteland itself unfortunately however is just a simple background, would have loved to see more of that.

The gameplay is, in easy to describe terms, a management game as you need to balance power, food and water while also trying to steadily increase the size of your vault and its population. You can keep expanding underground however you will need more power reactors to provide energy to those rooms and more vault dwellers means more resources that need to be consumed. It helps to make the game constantly challenging as you can’t just keep building things and expect to get better. You collect resources yourself as they are made by tapping on each room and you can personalise each vault dweller by giving them weapons and clothing. You obtain these items by sending your dwellers out into the wasteland where you get a personal journal type rundown of their adventures or by collecting lunchboxes which are rewards you can get from completing certain objectives or you can buy them. This is where the free to play element lets you pay money however during my entire time playing I never felt as though I needed to buy anything, I would only need to if I felt as though I wanted my game to go a little bit quicker. This is excellent as a lot of free to play games these days almost require you to pay money, but this game bucks the trend and I absolutely love that.

See that face? You’ll be seeing a lot of that…

The game however is not perfect. I was playing the new Android version and the new stuff added into the game like Deathclaws and Mr Handys helped to flesh out the end of the game but stability was a huge problem for me. I was playing on a fairly good tablet and yet my game was slowing down considerably at times and crashed on quite a few occasions. The game also feels a bit… boring at times as you will sometimes just find yourself waiting around for resources to appear and collect which becomes very annoying as you find yourself in periods of simply nothing happening. Finally I don’t know if this is just me or not but the fact that your resources continue to drain while you aren’t even playing the game is incredibly frustrating. I tried to find some way to stop the game running in the background when I turned my tablet off but to no avail I simply kept on playing. This meant that every time before I had to turn off my tablet I had to stockpile on resources so that at least when I turned my tablet back on I wouldn’t find half of my vault dwellers dead. If there was some way to disable this and have it so that the game only plays when the app is open then that would be a great addition.

Overall it isn’t any Fallout 4, but its still a fun timewaster, especially if you are playing in on a train or bus journey. It’s a game that you don’t truly focus on but instead have it running in the background to slowly gather resources, whether it be while you are playing other games, doing important work or heck even writing a review! Speaking of which raiders just attacked my vault… I better get running! Try the game out it’s free! What’s not to love.