Fallout Shelter (2015)

This is a goodbye review as I purge mobile games from my phone.

I've only really played Fallout 3, which I enjoyed immensely, but otherwise I have little experience with this franchise. It was, however, enough to get me interested in this mobile resource management game. While its animation and gameplay was pleasant enough, it's still probably been years since I actually logged into this game.

Like quite a few mobile games of this stripe, you're in charge of a facility that has survived a large scale cataclysm. You create facilities with resources, direct people to undertake necessary tasks, and level up facilities to unlock more abilities. Unlike quite a few mobile games of this stripe, I have some fairly positive memories tied up with this game.

While I wouldn't call this a difficult deletion, I feel like this has been one of the more benign games thus far in terms. It's associated with a franchise I enjoy, and it never felt like it was grabbing for my wallet too much. It did, of course demand my time if I wanted to keep things running smoothly.

Resource management games tend to be like that by design, though. So, I very well can't fault this game just for being what it's supposed to be.

Goodbye, Fallout Shelter. You were decent. Maybe someday I'll return, but if not, know I'll remember you fondly.

In the world of mobile gaming, Fallout Shelter is a standout title that gained significant popularity due to its charming post-apocalyptic setting and engaging management mechanics. As you embark on the journey of managing your very own Vault, the early stages of the game are filled with excitement and discovery. However, the longer you play, the more apparent it becomes that the game may not be able to maintain its initial allure.

During the initial hours, Fallout Shelter shines with its delightful blend of resource management, dwellers' assignment, and room construction. The satisfaction of seeing your Vault grow and thrive is undeniable, and the introduction of new mechanics and rooms keeps you invested. The various challenges presented, such as managing resources and keeping dwellers happy, create a balanced and intriguing experience.

As you progress further into the game, it becomes apparent that the later stages lack the same level of depth and innovation found in the beginning. While the addition of quests does provide some respite, the repetitiveness of these missions soon starts to wear thin. The absence of new gameplay elements leaves players with little motivation to continue expanding their Vaults, leading to a sense of stagnation.

The game's failure to introduce fresh mechanics or content in the later stages leaves players with limited options to keep themselves engaged. The reliance on quests, which eventually lose their charm, highlights the need for more varied content and better late-game progression.

In conclusion, Fallout Shelter is a game with immense potential and a captivating start. However, it falters as it progresses, losing the sense of excitement and discovery that initially drew players in. To sustain long-term player interest, the developers could explore adding more depth, variety, and meaningful late-game content to keep the experience fresh and rewarding.

Fallout Shelter, for PC

Rating: 5.0/10: Average

Fallout Shelter is a 2D construction/resource/person management simulation, where you run the title of the game as an overseer. You must construct rooms and assign population to work there in order to generate a variety of resources that are needed to survive. Food, water and power are the main ones, while there are also 2 types of healing drugs.

The game starts off with a number of free people ready to live in your vault and some money. You must then construct the basic resource generating buildings, as well as living quarters (which determine your maximum population), and then click and drag people to work in specific rooms. Unfortunately, clicking and dragging people is much harder than it needs to be as you must get the cursor right on them or you will instead drag the camera. This gets even more difficult when they are running around in an emergency when you need to micromanage them the most. The game desperately needs a pause where you can issue orders, build, upgrade change equipment etc. You can’t even pause the game to go to the bathroom! It does save constantly though so don’t expect to be able to alt-F4 out of bad situations.

Each room has a specific character stat that determines a worker’s effectiveness, which makes it fairly simple to determine who goes where. Rooms can also be upgraded and combined into larger rooms though the combination does not always happen. It seems that you have to build and upgrade one space at a time in order to get a single massive room, and there is no way to merge rooms if you fail to build properly. Not good. Even worse, you must click on each room to collect the resources generated by that room and until you do so, the room will be idle. It takes about 2 minutes or so to generate resources so you have to constantly do this nonsense clicking. There is an option to rush a room to get immediate resources and free money with a failure chance. Failing causes a disaster. This is more pointless busywork.

Everything else in the game, such as waiting for pregnant women to give birth (put couples in the living quarters to breed), waiting for children to grow up, waiting for people to explore outside, waiting for people to get to quest locations, waiting for crafting to complete, and waiting for training to complete, take literal hours. The game is very boring if you just sit there and watch it so it is the kind of game that you load up every few hours or so, or keep running in the background while you do something else. But the constant need to click for resources means you cannot keep the game running and unattended for too long. Ridiculous. Game needs programmable pause scenarios so that you can go away from the game and it will automatically pause if something happens that would require your attention.

Disasters include fires, infestations and attacks. All disasters can be ignored by keeping your people out of affected rooms and you will only lose the resources that those people would have been generating; this makes little sense. Fires cost way too much health to extinguish, enemies are fairly difficult for your incompetent people to defeat (when compared to any other Fallout game), and it is silly how enemies can beat down the door to your vault to get in. Is it made of wood? I could see them following someone you sent outside and attacking while the door was open. Healing icons will appear over the heads of dwellers that are near death, allowing you to use meds to save them. It is generally easy to use the meds to keep everyone alive (if you have the meds that is), though it does get slightly annoying as they run around and sometimes the health bar disappears when they move into the background.

When you select someone to go explore the wasteland, make sure they have a decent weapon as that is the most important factor for how well they will perform. An outfit, stimpaks and radaway will help them survive longer. Expect people you send out to be gone for 8hrs+ real time before they get anything worthwhile. The game does not tell you that they will continue having encounters out in the wasteland when you turn the game off. Seriously, if you go to bed or work expect anyone you sent out to be dead unless they are a super prepared badass. This is completely unacceptable; to have a game dictate to me how and when I play it is beyond ridiculous. Then after you pay caps to revive them and they finally get back, you better have enough storage space to hold ALL of their loot or the person will stand outside the vault twiddling their thumbs. While you can sell stuff directly from the person, there is no way to take one item at a time to distribute amongst your people. Even more ridiculous is that you cannot take the caps to build the storage space needed to hold the loot.

There are mobile game features that encourage microtransactions. Little quests that reward money or loot boxes; you can abandon one per day unless you spend premium currency. The loot boxes you get have random rewards, which can range from complete garbage to some of the best things in the game. You can also spend that premium currency to speed up most things in the game. There are no pay walls or anything like that though; the microtransactions are completely optional and there is no reason you cannot complete the game entirely for free.

The best part of the game is questing. By building the overseer’s office you gain access to a list of quests; some of which are daily, weekly or limited time. Quests have certain requirements such as character level, weapon power and specific outfits, and you select up to 3 characters to go while also assigning them healing drugs. After waiting for the 1 hour or more it takes for them to get to the destination, you can then take control of them. Your vault is put on pause and the screen changes to another vault or surface building and you control the characters in the same way that you do in your own vault; click and drag to explore rooms one at a time. Sometimes there are dialogue options, though I have not noticed any difference in outcome. Sometimes there are sparkly objects to loot, and often there are enemies. Combat is slightly different than in your vault, though all you can really do is assign targets (they annoyingly always attack separate targets), use healing and do a click-at-the-proper-moment minigame for critical hits. There are also bosses with special attacks, though I only played long enough to see a single special attack and have no idea if this changes later on. Then it takes over an hour for them to get back to your vault when the quest is complete.

There is an optional survival mode which features permadeath, drastically increased incident occurrence and overall makes everything a bit harder. It makes the bad parts of the game even worse and greatly encourages gaming the timers by only playing in short spurts at a time. I recommend creating some kind of naming convention for your people to prevent you from trying to breed relatives (they will just stand there and not breed). I wish the game had a family tree, or at least indicated who a character’s parents are.

Based on gameplay alone I would give this game a 4 out of 10 for its general clunkiness, user unfriendliness and lousy mobile game mechanics. I raise it to a 5 for being completely free and not requiring buying into the microtransions and loot boxes. If you can get past all of that it is quite possible to have some fun; even if that fun is only for minutes at a time while you do something like take a break at work, wait in line, or take public transit.

Fallout Shelter

Synopsis:

Fallout Shelter puts you in control of a state-of-the-art underground Vault from Vault-Tec. Build the perfect Vault, keep your Dwellers happy, and protect them from the dangers of the Wasteland.

Pros:

• Customization of characters
• New elements unlocked over time to keep things interesting
• You can have pets
• Participate in the quest with your dwells, for a better loot
• Humourous dialogues between dwells when zooming
• View the history of your dewlls when they are sent to wasteland in real time

Cons:

• Overpriced
• Micro-transactions are incredibly tempting.
• Lots of sitting, waiting and checking up on the game
• No auto-save

Scores:

• History - 5/10
• Music - 5.5/10
• Graphics - 8/10
• Contents - 10/10
• Gameplay - 7.5/10

Final Opinion:

Fallout Shelter is a game where the player owns his vault and can manage as he want. The player starts with some dwells that helped build the vault, given the status of each one, if one has higher strength, it is logical to go to one of the resources that requires this status. When more features more dwells will be accurate and vice versa. They may come from the desert or as babies of the next generation.

The player can send dwells on missions that may take real time. As soon as they arrive at the destination, you have to explore by clicking and attacking the mission boss and waiting for the return of these dwells to arrive.

We must defend the vaut of the invaders from time to time, and for this the player can equip their dwells with a booed number of Armor and Weapons, being able to Crafting or catch of the dead enemies.

The only drawback to this type of games is that they are repetitive after some time, but I think the Fallout Shelter is great for chilling out in short breaks.

But attention!!!! Always record before you leave the game because otherwise you will lose all progress.

And besides it’s free, existing almost for each platform, so anyone who wants to spend a good bit in the short pause strength in it.

Note: 7.2/10

The game starts out fairly well when you are discovering how to run the vault efficiently. The graphics are smooth and it's easy to see what you are doing.

I made a few vaults. The best was when I was lucky enough to get the legendary dweller Sarah Lyons from a free card pack for completing an easy objective early in the game. She starts at level 42 and comes with a Wazer Wifle, some power armor, and some fairly high stats. I sent her out into the wasteland to collect gear for the other dwellers. This is the extent of the game. Send dwellers into the wasteland to get gear for your other dwellers, and the other dwellers collect resources so that the vault doesn't die. Sometimes the vault will be broken into by raiders who are wielding clubs, or rad roaches who enter vault rooms through the floor. Let's ignore the fact that the vault door can be broken by clubs, and that you play as an Overseer who sends people outside of the vault (!) and just continue with the other issues the game has.

Unlike some other endless simulation games, there was no real carrot on a stick to hold my interest for too long. Getting more dwellers in your vault unlocks more rooms, but none of the rooms were really exciting to get. Some of the rooms allow you to increase dwellers Special stats, but the purpose is largely to collect resources so you can expand your vault. Nothing exciting here. No interesting goals.

The best part of the game is the dialogue between dwellers that are in the same room, and the journal of the dwellers you send into the wasteland. The writing can be humorous as you would expect from a Fallout game.

Overall, the game did not live up to any expectations for a Fallout game, even if it's 'only' a mobile game. If this did not carry the Fallout name, I seriously doubt anyone would play this for very long. It feels like an endless ant farm simulator with wasted potential.