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.
Vault-Tec has provided the tools, but the rest is up to you.
Balancing the need to produce food, water, and power – all while fending off radroaches, raiders, and other dangers is a good challenge… at first. But oddly, once you succeed the fun fades away because of the lack of a planned-out endgame.
What could possibly go wrong when putting us in charge of a vault? In Fallout Shelter’s earliest (and most fun) moments, it turns out the answer is pretty much everything. The core gameplay loop is easy to understand – as new citizens are born or recruited into your vault, you must dig into a mountain to construct Living Quarters for them to sleep, as well as Water Treatment Plants and Cafeterias to produce their food and water, and Power Plants to keep all these factories operating.
Things build instantly, but you do have to wait to earn enough Caps to pay for construction – and Fallout Shelter commendably doesn’t try to make us to pay to speed things up, In fact, you can’t.
The game suffers from two Fundamental Problems: It’s built with a free-to-play revenue scheme that undermines its integrity; and there just isn’t all that much to do to begin with.
Because Fallout Shelter is free-to-play, we quickly learn that we have to make a choice very early on in the game: Either we accept very slow progression or we buy lunchboxes with special cards in them for real money.
On the other hand, once you make the purchase (which I did, after a while, to see how fundamentally it changed the game) and have a bunch of lunchboxes and special cards, the game becomes rather easy—but at least it moves along at a nice clip. You’ll have more caps to spend, more dwellers, and more guns and outfits to go around.
gamers should check the game out, especially since it’s free. But I don’t recommend spending any real money on the game.
