Fallout Shelter

Fallout Shelter is a mobile/tablet game based on the Fallout series. I thought it looked quite neat when it was revealed at E3 earlier this year, but because I don’t own a smartphone or tablet, it wasn’t something I was able to play. But now, thanks to the wonders of technology, it’s possible to play Fallout Shelter on PC.

I’m actually playing it right now, as I’m typing this. If there’s one good thing I can say about Fallout Shelter, is that it’s a nice little game to have running in the background when you’re busy with other things. Like most mobile/tablet based games, it’s not really designed for extended play, but short, productive bursts when you have anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to spare.

You play as an Overseer to your own personal vault. You begin small, with a handful of rooms and vault dwellers, but soon begin to expand. Rooms cost caps, the currency of Shelter which can be earned in various ways – but not, it should be noted, by an in-game purchase. Well, not quite. We’ll get back to those later. Your vault and its residents require and consume three resources – power, water and food – all of which are generated by the appropriate rooms. 

So let’s break down exactly how this works – expanding your shelter and increasing your population will generate more resources, but an increased population also consumes more resources. This creates a solid, if repetitive cycle of expand, upgrade, populate and repeat. It’s undeniably addictive – at least for a few days.

The primary limitation to your expansion isn’t resources, however, but caps. Every room or upgrade has a cap price. The prices are tolerable, but they can slow expansion down to a tedious crawl during the early stages of the game. Of course, it is possible to purchase more caps, but it’s not as straightforward as you might expect. You can purchase ‘lunch boxes’ which hold four or five random cards. These may be weapons, outfits, dwellers, or a specific amount of a resource type or caps.

I’m not sure if this is better or worse than simply selling caps in variously sized bundles. At least then you’re guaranteed to get the caps you want, but using this system, there’s no way of knowing exactly what you’re going to get. It feels a little insidious, the system encouraging people to buy ‘just one more box’ in the hope of getting what they need.

No, I’ve not bought any boxes myself, but I can’t deny the temptation is there. We’re not all immune to slick presentation. Every time you open a mystery box, it’s like a little pleasure button being pushed in your brain. And the game teases you with these boxes, tossing you a few free ones early on to whet your appetite.

And Fallout Shelter is very slick. It looks great, has nice sound effects and animations. Its UI could use some work though, especially when you want to examine dweller statistics at a glance, or sort through your inventory. And yes, it’s fun to play. It’s neat watching your shelter expand, assigning dwellers to various roles based upon their stats. Training them, levelling them up, sending them out to the wasteland to scavenge for supplies and hopefully return alive.

 

The game seems relatively bug free, but I’ve had issues with the random raider attacks – my assigned guards either ignoring the raiders, or running off to another part of the shelter. I also had an odd issue where I quit the game for a few hours, leaving my vault in good shape, only to return and find it in a terrible state with nearly zero resources and all of my dwellers suffering from radiation exposure. I still don’t know quite what happened but it forced me to restart.

My main problem with Fallout Shelter is that it’s all just too simple and repetitive. Like I said, it’s undeniably addictive for a few days, but the more you play, the more you realise just how shallow, limited and ultimately pointless the experience is. There’s no depth, challenge or complexity. I was disappointed by the dweller management, hoping to do more than simply equip them with an outfit and assign them to a room.

What about shift management? What about assigning supervisors to different departments? What about letting us f**k with the dwellers in weird and wacky experiments? And there’s very little in the way of random or exciting events aside from the same outbreaks of fires, roaches or little bands of raiders. There’s really not much to it at all, when you stop to think about it.

‘Exploring’ the wasteland is just a slow way of gathering random gear…to make it easier to gather more random gear. You expand your shelter to generate more resources…in order to expand your shelter to generate more resources. During the early stages of the game, increasing your stash of caps takes time, but you’ll eventually reach the point when you’ll be able to generate more than you really need.

This means that although the game opens up in terms of expanding and upgrading your vault, there’s also nothing really left for you to do but sit back, watch, and gather resources you no longer require. There’s no ‘end game’ as such, because Shelter only gets easier the longer you play. There’s no real goal, other than to expand until you’re tired of it. It’s just a mater of – expand, upgrade, expand, upgrade, get bored, start over, rinse and repeat.

 

Which isn’t actually such a bad thing. The structure, though repetitive, works. The problem is, there’s simply not enough variation to make it interesting. There’s not enough different types of rooms, dwellers or styles of vault you can build. Ultimately, every vault will operate the same, and once you figure out the most efficient method of expansion, there’s very little reason to deviate from it.

It doesn’t help that you can’t pick and choose what rooms to build regardless of the cost, as every room is ‘locked’ out until you hit a certain population. This means that your vault layout will typically always follow the same structure. It severely limits player creativity in terms of vault design. What’s even worse, is that if you decide to remove a room because you don’t like its placement, you only get back a tiny fraction of its cost, discouraging experimentation.

The ability to force your dwellers to have children offers some amusement, as you play a somewhat twisted game of eugenics as you attempt to selectively breed the best ‘stats’ in their offspring (although it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference). There’s something a little insulting about it though, as it basically reduces your female dwellers to baby factories. Not to mention, when pregnant, your women are utterly useless in a crisis – seriously, they just run about and wave their arms in the air.

Fallout Shelter isn’t a bad little game, but it’s far too shallow and simplistic to seriously hold my attention. I was hoping for more complexity and depth to the vault and dweller management. But ultimately, it only offers a simple and repetitive experience, one which begins to lose its appeal after only a few short days when you realise you’ve seen everything it has to offer. It’s a shame, because managing a Fallout vault is a pretty cool idea for a game, but Fallout Shelter sadly falls short of its potential.