Callum Munro
(I try my hardest not to spoil any major parts of the plot)
My reviews are split into 3 sections that are rated out of 10, CONCEPT (The aim/idea/plot of the game), VISUALS (What the game looks like), GAMEPLAY (How the game plays and how fun it is).
Fallout Shelter is Bethesda's mobile game debut, released June 14th 2015 for iOS and August 13th on Android.
You can get it for free off of both respective app stores.
Concept/Story
In Fallout Shelter you take the role of Overseer, where you will manage and build your own unique vault inhabited with similarly unique dwellers that you take in from the wasteland.
It has a very Tiny Tower feel too it, in the way that people arrive at your vault and you must decide where they would best fit depending on their personal skills and attributes. There are 3 main sources that you must maintain, otherwise your people will die, rooms will be shut down and basically just horrid things will happen. These are water, power and food.
To keep these high, you must make sure that you have built a specific room that generates that particular source, however the challenge comes from the fact they are all dependent on eachother, which is again very similar to the challenge of Tiny Tower games.
For example, you need power to run a room, you need rooms to store people, you need people to generate the sources from the rooms etc etc. Before you know it, you will be out of food, water and power whilst Deathclaws raid your vault picking the flesh from the bones of all the children that live there.
Not only do you need to focus all of your thoughts on the inside of the vault, but also outside in the vast wasteland. This is because you can send out your dwellers to find loot and experience points, whilst being updated with a sort of live commentary of their travels. Because of this feature, it is important to accrue a nice inventory full of weapons, armour and stimpaks which by the way are all actually from the Fallout games.
To get lovely gear, your dwellers can retrieve stuff from their travels that you send them on, or if you complete certain objectives you receive a lunchbox, which is a box full of 5 random items, which can be anything from weapons to unique characters from Fallout 3 & 4 to live in your vault.
It's hard to fully discuss the concept of this game without writing pages and pages of description, however this is the basic point of the game, to build a vault, maintain it, keep everyone happy and keep everyone alive.
Even though it is very simple and you probably won't be playing it for ever, Fallout Shelter absolutely nails the concept of building and maintaining a small colony, by using unique and addicting methods of storytelling, mixed with brilliant humour and a surprisingly massive game structure.
Also being set in the world of Fallout automatically makes you fall in love with everything you see on the screen.
CONCEPT/STORY - 8.7
Visuals
Visually Fallout Shelter is a very different experience to other games in its genre, and that's because of the use of depth in the rooms.
You see your vault from a side view, as if a big hill was cut in half and you could see into it. This looks great as it is, but the added 3 dimensional zoom feature is excellent and really adds a depth to the perception of the rooms.
You see your vault from a side view, as if a big hill was cut in half and you could see into it. This looks great as it is, but the added 3 dimensional zoom feature is excellent and really adds a depth to the perception of the rooms.
Fallout Shelter proudly shows off the signature Fallout art style with the pre-war propaganda look too it, and all of the menus are displayed on black and bright green CRT screens.
For all Fallout fans this is just pornography to the eye, especially with that ongoing want of more and more fallout, so keeping with the familiar art style is awesome for fans of the franchise.
For all Fallout fans this is just pornography to the eye, especially with that ongoing want of more and more fallout, so keeping with the familiar art style is awesome for fans of the franchise.
Fallout Shelter does look pretty, and the completely unique 3 dimensional camera is great.
The only problem is, when your vault gets massive, even though it looks nice from a distance, the visuals become fairly over populated meaning the 3D camera becomes pretty much redundant.
VISUALS - 8
Gameplay
As I explained in the concept section, the gameplay consists of you building a vault into a hill, maintaining it with specific rooms and dwellers.
First lets talk about the rooms.
Each room in Fallout Shelter serves a purpose whether it provides food or water, or whether it is to hold all of your weapons and armour. Each room costs caps to build, and caps are gained from gaining resources, dwellers leveling up, lunchboxes and explorations.
The reason Fallout Shelter is quite difficult at first is because so many different things are dependent on other things, so it's difficult to understand when to expand your vault, and how to do it.
Now this works great, and adds a challenge to the game, however this is also its downfall. As you put more and more days into the game, it becomes far too easy. All of your dwellers will have leveled up by now, and will be producing tonnes and tonnes of your resources that you need.
This also makes the game quite tiresome after a while, and even though it is brilliant to be able to have your own Fallout vault in your pocket, there isn't much to do after a certain amount of time.
One other niggle I have with the gameplay, are some of the controls.
Firstly you move characters around by dragging them, which is just horrible. The reason being, you pretty much have to be zoomed out if you want to move somebody fairly far through the vault, and then when you're zoomed out it is near impossible to select and drag the correct person, unless your fingers are like rods of pencil lead.
To me it's just unnecessary, and even though it works fine when you only have 2 or 3 levels to your vault, as you progress it becomes more than tedious.
Also I found on android that there doesn't seem to be a back button on some of the screens. For example if you select a character to see their stats and equipment, there is no in game back button to go back to the main screen.
This may sound really picky, but using the return key on my actual phone, feels unnatural as it is normally used to close apps.
Where Fallout Shelter excels in my opinion is the fact that there is absolutely no "Pay to Finish Now" options. In fact the only thing you can pay real money for are for lunchboxes, which are completely optional and you are awarded them on a fairly regular basis anyway.
For example say you really need water, but your workers in your water plant wont be producing any for another 3 minutes, you cannot pay to finish early, like most other games.
No, rather you try and "Rush" them. When you rush a room there is a chance they will finish instantly and produce the resource, or they will fail and something bad will happen to the room like a rad roach infestation.
It gets rid of the disgusting pay to win apocalypse that mobile games are in, and adds an extremely clever risk/reward system that still can benefit you.
Like I mentioned in the Concept section, there really is a lot of gameplay features in this game that you need to simply experience yourself. I have just picked out the ones that I believe back up my final score for the game.
Gameplay is flawed, and gets far too easy after a while. However it does have some great gameplay features that will keep you interested whilst it's still challenging.
GAMEPLAY - 6.9
Fallout Shelter for me is the best game that has been developed on a mobile phone.
However as most mobile games are, it is let down by an unfortunate tendency to get a bit boring after a while.
Each room in Fallout Shelter serves a purpose whether it provides food or water, or whether it is to hold all of your weapons and armour. Each room costs caps to build, and caps are gained from gaining resources, dwellers leveling up, lunchboxes and explorations.
The reason Fallout Shelter is quite difficult at first is because so many different things are dependent on other things, so it's difficult to understand when to expand your vault, and how to do it.
Now this works great, and adds a challenge to the game, however this is also its downfall. As you put more and more days into the game, it becomes far too easy. All of your dwellers will have leveled up by now, and will be producing tonnes and tonnes of your resources that you need.
This also makes the game quite tiresome after a while, and even though it is brilliant to be able to have your own Fallout vault in your pocket, there isn't much to do after a certain amount of time.
One other niggle I have with the gameplay, are some of the controls.
Firstly you move characters around by dragging them, which is just horrible. The reason being, you pretty much have to be zoomed out if you want to move somebody fairly far through the vault, and then when you're zoomed out it is near impossible to select and drag the correct person, unless your fingers are like rods of pencil lead.
To me it's just unnecessary, and even though it works fine when you only have 2 or 3 levels to your vault, as you progress it becomes more than tedious.
Also I found on android that there doesn't seem to be a back button on some of the screens. For example if you select a character to see their stats and equipment, there is no in game back button to go back to the main screen.
This may sound really picky, but using the return key on my actual phone, feels unnatural as it is normally used to close apps.
Where Fallout Shelter excels in my opinion is the fact that there is absolutely no "Pay to Finish Now" options. In fact the only thing you can pay real money for are for lunchboxes, which are completely optional and you are awarded them on a fairly regular basis anyway.
No, rather you try and "Rush" them. When you rush a room there is a chance they will finish instantly and produce the resource, or they will fail and something bad will happen to the room like a rad roach infestation.
It gets rid of the disgusting pay to win apocalypse that mobile games are in, and adds an extremely clever risk/reward system that still can benefit you.
Like I mentioned in the Concept section, there really is a lot of gameplay features in this game that you need to simply experience yourself. I have just picked out the ones that I believe back up my final score for the game.
Gameplay is flawed, and gets far too easy after a while. However it does have some great gameplay features that will keep you interested whilst it's still challenging.
GAMEPLAY - 6.9
Fallout Shelter for me is the best game that has been developed on a mobile phone.
However as most mobile games are, it is let down by an unfortunate tendency to get a bit boring after a while.
As always thanks for reading.
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