Fallout Shelter 

 

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.
Fallout Shelter has enjoyed a special place in my heart—or at least on my tablet—for much of the past year. Originally released as a teaser of sorts for Fallout 4, it was a great way to whet my appetite for exploring the wastes. You're in control of a new vault, building new rooms, changing the layout, upgrading your vault dwellers and their equipment, and sending people out scavenging in the wasteland.

I've played Fallout Shelter a lot—and by that I mean I've pretty much maxed out my vault on my Android tablet (an Nvidia Shield, if you're wondering). I have the maximum allowed 200 vault dwellers, plus six extras waiting outside (never mind the 10 dwellers I evicted when I wanted to add Old Man Longfellow when he showed up to coincide with the Far Harbor launch). Everyone is at level 50 with max stats, and they all have legendary weapons. No cheating was involved, and I haven't spent a single penny. Months of playing 15-20 minutes daily adds up, but you do reach the point where the gameplay runs thin.
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.

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.

BUILD THE PERFECT VAULT
Create a brighter futureunderground! Select from a variety of modern-day rooms to turn an excavation beneath 2,000 feet of bedrock into the very picture of Vault Life.

OVERSEE A THRIVING COMMUNITY
Get to know your Dwellers and lead them to happiness. Find their ideal jobs and watch them flourish. Provide them with outfits, weapons, and training to improve their abilities.

PROSPER
A well-run Vault requires a variety of Dwellers with a mix of skills. Build a Radio Room to attract new Dwellers. Or, take an active role in their personal lives; play matchmaker and watch the sparks fly!

EXPLORE THE WASTELAND
Send Dwellers above ground to explore the blasted surface left behind and seek adventure, handy survival loot, or unspeakable death. Find new armor and weapons, gain experience, and earn Caps. But dont let them die!

PROTECT YOUR VAULT
From time to time, idyllic Vault life may be disrupted by the dangers of post-nuclear life. Prepare your Dwellers to protect against threats from the outsideand within.

Citizens, who are drawn in the signature Fallout Vault Boy art style, are assigned to work in specific factories via simple drag controls, and they earn resources more rapidly if you correctly match a citizen’s stats to the factory in which they work. It’s satisfying to get everyone working in the perfect job and see your vault begin humming along. The catch is that for the first few days you never feel like you have enough people or enough resources to man every station you need manned, and that shortage creates the interesting decisions of Fallout Shelter. Do you want your shelter to have clean drinking water, or enough food to eat? Can you scrimp and save for another housing room?
As you might expect, the experience on a PC is both similar and strikingly different than using a tablet. (I never tried Shelter on a smartphone, due to the cramped screen size.) You can use a touchscreen display for some things, but pinch-to-zoom isn't supported, which is a pretty significant omission. The mouse does work fine, though, with the scroll wheel zooming in and out. Using a mouse instead of a touchscreen doesn't quite have the same feel, but on a larger display I imagine lifting my arm would get tiresome.

The PC version supports hotkeys (e.g. press 'B' for build, 'Esc' to exit most menus, etc.), but this isn't a fast-paced real-time strategy game so the hotkeys are welcome but not necessary. The graphics also use what was classified as 'HD zoom' on Android, where the 3D environment is fully rendered even when zoomed out. Of course, there are times where the flat perspective is easier to deal with (like finding the Mysterious Stranger), but that's a minor point.

It’s a fun game of trade-offs. Every time it feels like you might be getting ahead, a random raider attack, fire, or radroach invasion has the potential to knock your perfectly planned equilibrium out of whack. It kept me on my toes and kept me coming back, and so did the constant obscure references to Fallout Lore and amusing (albeit sparse) writing. The cheesy lines couples say to one another before obediently heading off-camera to make a baby are a particular highlight.

the bigger your vault grows, the more this thoughtful balancing act fades away. Fallout Shelter gets easier the bigger your vault is - not harder. It feels backwards. My 150+ population vault has more than 25 people with no job at all, just wandering the floors. I no longer need to optimize my factories, because I have an excess of all resources. My citizens want for nothing, and I have no more buildings to unlock or goals to work towards.  I can expand my vault deeper and build a sixth Power Plant or third food-producing Garden, but that would just give me an even bigger resource surplus. Have I won? Is this it?

Fallout Shelter is desperately in need of a set of endgame goals or resource sinks to look forward to and build towards, or else players will see all the game has to show us in around a week of steady play.
With the Fallout Shelter PC release and update to version 1.6, Bethesda has added some new game mechanics, supplementing the earlier additions of crafting, new rooms, and new creatures that have trickled in since the game came out one year ago. Some of the additions are pretty mundane—a few new weapons, and near-death dwellers now show stimpak/radaway icons that you can tap for faster healing in a battle—while others change the game in some substantial ways. The new stuff definitely adds to the end-game content, giving you more stuff to do on a regular basis; here's the rundown of the major additions:

    Overseer's Office: a new room that allows you to send vault dwellers on quests; can be upgraded to allow two or three concurrent quests.
    Questing: send groups of up to three vault dwellers on quests—see below.
    Nuka-Cola Quantum: used to boost (immediately finish) crafting as well as traveling to/from quest locations and returning from the wasteland; can also be used to skip extra objectives (beyond the normal one skip per day limit).
    Radscorpions and Ghouls: two new monsters that deal radiation damage as well as physical damage; RadAway is now used far more often than before.
The experience feels like a solid and somewhat fun foundation for a deeper and better game that just isn’t here (yet). There are no vault decoration or customization options. No options to trade with other players or trade caravans. There is no need give any thought to the specific positioning of the rooms in your fault, beyond keeping your most essential buildings near your power plant in case of emergencies. There is no need to craft specific items or think about production lines. Any or all of these features would make Fallout Shelter a deeper and more rewarding game in the long term, as we see in similar mobile games, including very casual mobile hits like FarmVille 2: Country Escape and Township.

The trade-off for this super-simple, never-evolving gameplay loop is that Fallout Shelter is extremely accessible. It’s still fun having a burgeoning fallout shelter in your pocket at all times to peek in on. Fallout Shelter also scores some bonus points for the gentle way it asks us to spend money. You can buy packs of cards that supply a random assortment of special citizens, weapons, equipment, or resources, but it never feels essential or forced. Virtually every other gameplay element must be earned the old-fashioned mobile way - by just waiting around.

While the new monsters and Nuka-Cola Quantum are somewhat interesting, it's the addition of questing that really shakes things up. The Overseer's Office has a list of at least three potential quests, including one daily quest. The rewards involve the usual new equipment, junk, and/or blueprints, along with some that give you more Nuka-Cola Quantum, recruits, and perhaps other stuff. Quests require travel time, similar to wasteland exploration (return time is half the original travel time), but there's no random encounters along the way. Instead, you send a team to the destination, and once there you have to do some actual micro-managing of your team.

Exploring a location involves tapping/clicking your way through the various rooms, many of which will have combat as well as item caches. Combat is handled quite differently in quests. You can see health bars for your dwellers as well as the monsters, and each creature now targets one other creature. You can specify a target for each dweller (though this can be a bit finicky), and area of effect weapons (missile launcher and fat man variations) damage all the enemies in the room. That last point means it's almost always best to equip everyone with AOE weapons (assuming you have them), but some quests have armor/weapon restrictions that you'll have to take into account.