User Review : Fallout Shelter

A Fallout title that has Fallen Out from the Rest

This review is based upon my experience with Fallout Shelter on a Samsung Galaxy S5.

Mobile (phone) games are not usually a part of my palette. I have typically seen them as nothing more than a time waster that isn't worth my time. I however found myself interested in Fallout Shelter. I am a fan of resource gathering games, "perhaps this could be a good addition to the genre!" I thought. But after an extensive playthrough, it shies away from the typical resource gatherer.

Fallout Shelter doesn't strictly adhere to the resource gatherer principles. The basic premise is there. Manage a group of people that gather resources to stay alive as you make also make money. As they level up or have higher stats in certain SPECIAL attributes they can gather resources much more quickly. However, the method in which money and resources are gathered can be problematic. Nothing is automated; or rather, nothing is automated unless you pay money/get incredibly lucky. Resources have to be gathered manually. That means you can either stare at your screen for the x amount of time it takes to treat water/make food/generate energy or allow your vault dwellers to their task and return within that time frame. Immediately the time waster aspect of the mobile title is thrown out the window. The game doesn't attempt to engage you. You simply go away and come back to collect resources occasionally. This could result in days of work to expand your vault. Bethesda saw fit to introduce the most important part of a resource gatherer (the automation) as an RNG reward or paid microtransaction. Mr Handy; a robot well known in the Fallout series as being a "handman" of sorts. He performs menial labor for humans. In Fallout Shelter, he is the automation that collects resources for you. This addition is the biggest flaw of the game. It takes a basic element of the genre and adds it in as a paid microtransaction. It's a disappointing method of gaining money from the people who are playing this title.

Money or (Bottle) caps on the other hand, the currency of the Fallout Universe is what is necessary to physically expand your vault. For example; a Nuclear Reactor costs me 2100 caps to build and sequentially higher total amounts of caps to expand and upgrade. Gathering those caps is the problem and where the game becomes a "Pay to Not Wait" ordeal. To earn caps you have a few different options. Each time a vault dweller levels up (in general) you receive caps. Selling outfits and weapons results in caps, and a concept called "Rushing" also yields caps (which we shall touch on later). The problem is, they give you trivial amounts. My first vault took hours upon hours to simply sustain a group of thirty dwellers. I was constantly short on caps due to having to constantly expand and make sure resource quotes were being met. But once you figure out the trick to reaching these quotas, the game becomes more of a chore than anything.

The game does introduce some challenges for you to deal with while gathering resources. They come in the form of Rushing, random events, and wasteland gathering. Rushing allows you to speed up the processes of a single room to within a couple seconds. The drawback to this is that there is a fail rate. A random number generator decides whether you succeed or fail. Succeed and you gather resources and gain caps. Fail and you're met with a random event. Of those random events a fire can break out, a rad roach infestation can occur, or a mole rate invasion. Other random events not tied to rushing include Raider invasions and Deathclaw invasions. These invasions are nothing for high level dwellers with armor and weapons. For the people that aren't so fortunate to have these two things, they are deadly. An assumption from my experiences; the HP of these random occurrences scale with the number of dwellers you have. So while my first save file was at thirty dwellers rad roaches were invading and nearly destroying them. This is all because the weapons my dwellers had found while exploring the wasteland were mediocre at best. Oftentimes taking minutes to purge a single rad roach infestation. As I mentioned, this is nothing for my other save file in which I had a significant amount of lunch boxes, another microtransaction I will touch on later in this review. The final challenging aspect is sending your dwellers out to explore the wasteland. Making sure their stats are high, their equipment is good and their supplies are enough is necessary to keep them alive. But even then my dwellers have found very little in the waste. Typically low level shotguns and laser pistols, something which my Vault has outgrown a long time ago. This is where some have had to resort to lunch boxes.

Lunch boxes are the the prominent microtransaction in this game. They can be earned in game through challenges however, it is easier to simply purchase them. When a lunch box is opened, there are four cards inside. Each containing an item or resource you are awarded. This ranges from 100/500 caps, to a rare secret character, a rare weapon/outfit, x amount of resources, or average weapons/outfits. This is where the game is broken. Have enough lunch boxes and you can effectively farm everything you need there. Open up a couple and you have the possibility to get powerful armors and weapons to equip your vault dwellers with to fend off attack. True, you can find this equipment in game naturally, but the amount of time it took me to get one single power armor for a dweller in my first save file was cut into a fraction of a second with lunch boxes. Coupled with the fact that when I wasn't using lunch boxes, I hadn't found any of the powerful weapons that are necessary to fend off the higher level Deathclaws. This aspect truly makes the game pay to survive, in my eyes.

Lastly regarding graphics, they are adequate. That's not necessarily a bad thing. They get the job done and tell you what you need to know. There are many objects with little to no detail and a small amount of polygons, but for a phone title the game is aesthetically pleasing. There are minor details that make up for the low polygon counts, such as medpacks in your medbay, beds and furnishing in the living quarters, mini nukes, weapons and a range in your armory, etc. There are some incredibly low resolution 2D sprites to represent some of the minor details but that doesn't necessarily make the game ugly. The characters are represented in a 2D style similar to the widely known Vault Boy that represents the modern Fallout series, and that style fits in well with the game. They are detailed well. Weapons and outfits look very good and there is a nice variety of looks for your dwellers.

Performance and control is where I found some issue. Bethesda games tend to be criticized heavily for their bugs and this is no exception. I have had dwellers vanish. Only seeing them once I restarted the game. Healthbars appearing and disappearing for no reason or covering text. Health bars not appearing during invasions, resulting in me having to individually manage each dweller so they wouldn't die. Text being blurred and jumbled into a mess. Often my dwellers would run around in a circle for the entirety of an invasion, even if they were equipped with some of the strongest weapons the game has to offer. Nearing ninety vault dwellers I started to experience heavy slow down. Menus reacting several seconds after I touched them, less than ten frames per second. After a crash, the issue seemed to stop. Hopefully something that is not a prominent recurrence. Touch controls can be finicky or down right annoying. The easiest way to assign a dweller to a facility is to drag and drop them. At times you may accidentally grab a wrong dweller, or they may not even respond. Other times as you're dragging them to the destination of your choosing a random occurrence will pull you out of that and instantly bring your camera to focus in on the event. For any new wastelanders that wished to enter my vault, I found myself attempting to click on them multiple times; instead I would open up the menu which gives you statistics on what your explorer dwellers were up to. Unfortunately, there's also no real end game. The most you can do is build until the very bottom of the map, or collect all items. For other people, simply unlocking and building every structure type may constitute as enough.

Overall, Fallout Shelter leaves me with conflicting thoughts. As my first experience with the game was on Android instead of Iphone, any amount of hype I may have had for the title was non existent when I first played it. The game has many, many flaws. Ranging from performance issues, touch controls to basic elements of the genre it is based on. But I still find myself checking up on my vault every couple of hours. It's not the time waster that mobile games typically are. But it does offer a unique new experience in the Fallout universe. I would have loved to see some more invasions or a tower defense aspect coupled with the resource gathering. Despite the game being incredibly shallow, it has a charm that is enjoyable. I don't suggest paying as the microtransactions aren't very beneficial to your experience. They are simply there to remove the tedium. As a freeware phone title, and for those fans of Fallout, I would recommend it.