Fallout Shelter Brings Fallout Fun to Mobile Devices

The announcement of Fallout 4 caused all fans of the series to rejoice and start anticipating the next episode in the post-apocalyptic saga.  It also spawned a mobile game which has players striving to manage their own vaults.  Fallout Shelter brings the vault experience to you and gives you that little taste of Fallout to sustain you until the 2016 release of Fallout 4.

A large vault in Fallout Shelter.

I'm not big on mobile games.  They all seem to be designed with the goal of seeming free but aiming to get players to spend money in the form of micro-transactions.  Fallout Shelter falls into this category, but is playable without spending any cash.  Your goal is to create and run a functional vault--keeping your vault residents fed, watered, and happy.  Your vault starts off as just a few rooms but a short tutorial explains how to add more rooms. Prospective vault residents line up outside the vault door waiting to be admitted.  Each person has their own set of attributes (using the same SPECIAL set of traits from the Fallout games).  As the vault overseer you must decide which tasks to assign to these new vault dwellers.  Certain jobs within the vault lend themselves to specific attributes--the generator room is better for those with higher strength while the diner is more suited to agility.

Once you figure out the basics and get your residents assigned you can choose to send someone out to explore the wasteland.  Residents are needed to explore the wasteland because they can bring back valuable items like outfits and weapons.  Outfits provide stat boosts for your residents and weapons are needed to help them fight off the occasional raider attack.  Your intrepid explorer can stay in the wasteland for any duration of time and will generally bring back better loot the longer they are out.  They can be equipped with Stimpacks and RadAway to help them survive while they are beyond the walls of the vault.

As your population of vault dwellers grows--through babies born by assigning male and female dwellers with higher charisma to the same living quarter or new dwellers showing up at your vault--you unlock more rooms to help your vault function.  A medbay allows your dwellers with higher intelligence to create Stimpacks, a storage room provides a place to keep your outfits and weapons, and eventually you can unlock rooms that will allow you to raise specific skills of your dwellers.

I'm enjoying this quirky little mobile game.  My vault has been attacked by raiders twice and things looked bleak for awhile, but now things are going along pretty smoothly.  My iPad 2 seems to struggle with this game and I've had several lockups, so those of you with older devices might have some difficulties.  For a free game it's not too bad--there haven't been a bunch of advertisements or entreaties to make micro transactions.  It's got that signature Fallout feeling that makes you want to explore the wasteland.