Fallout Shelter Review

Let me first start this blog by saying I never really played any of the Fallout games.

Are you still there?

If so, good, because for all the countless hours I spent on this game, I don't feel that the background of the Fallout universe is terribly necessary to set the tone for Shelter. That being said, let's get on with it.

Premise:

Essentially, you run a small underground...well, shelter, that grows as your live in community does, or doesn't - it's growth or lack thereof is entirely up to you. You obtain and maintain resources for the comfort and happiness of your Dwellers, and in preparation for the inevitable Raider attacks. After that you simple keep everyone alive. Or you can resurrect them if you've earned enough bottle caps, which seems like an odd feature to have as it pretty much erases any sense of risk vs. reward for many facets of the game which I will explain later.

Expanding your Shelter's size both in room capacity and population is equally easy enough. The game is more or less a test of one's patience in the end beyond all else, and while I enjoy most games that feature the mostly boring plight of resource management, this game had a plethora of issues that I will unabashedly be listing here.

What's Wrong?

For starters, on a technical side of things, this game crashed. A lot. To the point where it was unforgivable and seriously messed with the flow of the game for me. If you did, or didn't have this problem, please comment below because I would like to know if I was alone in this experience or not. I even went so far as to uninstall and then reinstall the game, losing many beloved Dwellers and the progress of weeks worth of hours toward the growth of Shelter 067. This didn't fix it. It didn't even slow the issue down. Within an hour of playing I was crashing between ten and forty five minute intervals again. Needless to say, I was none too pleased, and after losing the contents of an earned lunchbox I decided to finally call it quits permanently.

That being said, the balance of this game is very delicate. If you grew your community too quickly without the appropriate resources allocated you're going to have a really bad time reinstating order, and if you're as neurotic and controlling as I have a tendency to be that means countless more hours fixing a fuck up you didn't realize was onset for the closest cliff. Mind you, none of this would have been terrible if directions had been more easily accessible by the player during the game, and what few are accessible have a great tendency to freeze, forcing the player from the game. Generally speaking, doing anything that forces a player from a game is some what game breaking by definition.

As far as the economy system is concerned, I can't say too much about that because I barely touched on it. I was often in a surplus of Nuca-Cola bottle caps while I played so I found no need to actually sell any of the items that my Dwellers obtained in the Outlands...or whatever the hell they were called. This may be a sign of a poor economy mechanic, or I simply may have jumped that algorithm before it effectively came into play for my game.

As for the resources, your main concerns are as such: electricity, water, food, ...and women?

This part of the game really made me stop and scratch my head, and based on some of the research I've done, I'm not the only one that's felt this way. Obviously one of the best ways to grow your Shelter's population is having people create families. The problem is, there's no real family dynamic between people after they've done the dirty in the very non-personal living cubes. Once the bump and grind occurs, everyone goes back to their jobs (once you kick them out of the living cube) a kid is birthed, and they become a part of what is essentially the busy bee hive that you're running here. Once that comes underway it is in fact very easy to loose track of whom birthed/fathered whom to the point where I'm pretty sure I had a very Lannister-like family tree going on for at least half of my Shelter. In essence, the women in these shelters, while they are work force essentials, are also necessary broodmares for the growth of my shelter. I'm not sure Bethesda intended this as any sort of sly socio-political commentary, but this, aside from the crashing, gave me quite a moment of pause while playing this game.

In the beginning of this game, and over the course of the first few hours, outsiders flock to your shelter for all the obvious reasons a person would during a Nuclear fallout (which seems to have already occurred at the onset of this game - rendering it a tad useless) but eventually that peters out, with the exception of raiding parties. Eventually, if you want to grow your shelter you are obliged to force your Dwellers to breed with one another, which thankfully isn't terribly difficult to to do. It simply requires forcing them into one of the living cubes for about an hour and eventually a baby emerges from that. It's the digital equivalent of holding two people's faces together and screaming "NOW KISS!"

The game rewards you with a grand menagerie of Shelter upgrades that are virtually useless. I never used anything other than the elevators, the living cubes, the resource rooms, and the storage room. I had an on-again/off-again love affair with the radio station that supposedly brought more Dwellers to the Shelter, but for multiple hours worth of the count down clock resetting itself every time I played the game and no one ever waiting to join the underground cult that was Shelter 067 I decided enough was enough with it and turned it into another food court.

End Review

To be fair, the game is free, aside from its in-app purchases that don't warrant anything of use as far as I'm concerned. The price is right for a few hours of mindless self indulgence where you can feel like the Overlord of a bunch of simple minded cartoon characters. Beyond that time slot you're really not playing toward anything other than having more inbred Dwellers and finally opening up some really neat rooms toward the 60+ population mark. 

Play the game for a few hours, and then move on to something that isn't Candy Crush. 

Overall, nice job, Bethesda, but I feel like your mobile department might need some more work on the technical side of things.