Bethesda shocked everyone at E3 by doing something really bad ass this year – revealing a game we didn’t know about and releasing it RIGHT THEN on the App Store. Fucking sweet! It is called Fallout Shelter and the game is a blast.
Imagine what it would be like to be an overseer of your very own vault. Now you can. Fallout Shelter is a vault simulator that gives you the power to create and design your very own Vault from the Fallout universe. For those that are unaware, Fallout is a universe where Mike Huckabee was elected President and started nuclear war with Russia over a make-believe god from the Bible that never really existed. The entire world is destroyed and a few survivors must exist in what is left – practically described as hell on earth.
The Fallout games, including the upcoming Fallout 4, give you the role of a Vault survivor who is traveling into the wasteland to find who knows what. Fallout Shelter gives you the same world with a different perspective – the people who are staying inside of the vaults!
You assign your dwellers to their different jobs, from purifying water to preparing food to generating power. As you might expect, these are the basic essentials of life in a vault and growing your population depends on management of these three resource productions. Once you get that going, the fun begins.
I assigned several dwellers to work in radio. They were instantly miserable, just like everyone I know in real life working in radio.
You can breed your vault dwellers! Yep, send two of them to a room together and they’ll start bumping uglies with the woman being pregnant. She’ll give birth to a child that resembles the parents too! Race included. It occurred to me how difficult this might make the game for white supremacists.
“Nucular”
You also train your vault dwellers in gyms, lounges and other rooms you can create to improve their SPECIAL stats. SPECIAL stats improve efficiency in certain rooms or productions or – especially – when you send your vault dwellers out into the wasteland to explore.
This bitch is going to need some serious charisma and intelligence training.
One of the most fun things you can do is send a vault dweller out to explore. They find all kinds of goodies like weapons, armor and bottle caps. You even get to read a real time log of what they are doing, which updates frequently enough to just casually watch.
He squashed it – no problem.
So that is the essence of the game. Yes, it is fun and yeah, you’ve probably read all of that shit everywhere too. So let’s bitch! That’s what I do bitches.
Things Wrong:
Tap detection sucks in this game. Sometimes, its like goddamn Where’s Waldo trying to tap the right guy. Often, I’ll tap someone and select the person to their right, too. Also, the drag and drop feature for dwellers breaks a lot and sometimes, you must restart the app to be able to move them. It is too difficult/cumbersome to move dwellers around. You will often select the wrong one or pan the entire camera instead of moving the little shit.
Radroaches = Terminators. Holy FUCK. There isn’t a more deadly event in this game than a radroach infestation in a 3-piece room. 4-6 indestructible fucking roaches show up and will kill your entire VAULT. Not just the room, but I’ve had a rad roach infestation kill my whole fucking vault. If you’re low on food and everyone’s health drops, then the roaches show up, you’re history. This will actually fuck your game up and make you start from scratch and this MUST be fixed.
Fucking just delete the game save now.
Why must I tap to collect resources from the rooms? I hate that. Completely unnecessary to this title. Make those things automatically collect! This way, I can focus on my explorers and not on dumb shit. Otherwise, if you let your game sit open and walk off, you will come back to a starving (Or totally dead) vault.
There is a crash that occurs when jumping to main menu then loading a different save file. This is repeatable.
The game is SUPER HEAVY on resources for older tablets. I have a 4th gen iPad and it runs the game but I wouldn’t want to try it on anything older. I also have an iPad 2 (i rule) and it will not run the game in a playable sense. Crashes after a few seconds of 1 frame per second action.
Fallout Shelter is a fun experience that still needs polish and hopefully, some more features and gameplay that will extend the life of it. However, the title is FREE and the premium aspect is so unnecessary, I wouldn’t bother touching any of the purchasable lunch boxes. You can earn them through in-game activity anyway and you lose everything if you ever start a new game, so why waste money on it there?
“Fans, I’m in this game!”
Fallout Shelter gets a 7/10. Very playable and very fun. On the Critic scale, 7/10 is good.