It’s been a busy couple of months for Fallout fans, hasn’t it? First, Fallout 4 gets announced, complete with a comprehensive gameplay demo, and then come E3 time, Bethesda release a brand new Fallout iOS game.

Rather than telling the story of an individual vault dweller let loose in a vicious post-apocalyptic wasteland, the player instead takes on the role of the Overseer in a random vault.

Starting with a humble handful of dwellers and rooms, the player has to slowly expand the vault by building new rooms and increasing the number of dwellers in the vault whilst trying to keep everybody healthy and happy.

The gameplay involves buying new rooms and having your dwellers maintain them. Each dweller has a set of skills, making them more suitable for certain jobs, so the player has to allocate them to rooms based on said skills.

Essentially, it’s a balancing act. You’ll want to keep all your female dwellers pregnant whilst maintaining your rooms in order to keep everybody healthy. Unfortunately, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep everything in the green.

To compensate for this, there’s a ‘rush’ mechanic, in which the player can attempt to rush a room’s production and replenish one of their dwindling stocks. However, rushing is a gamble, as there’s a chance that it can cause an accident, setting back production even further and putting your dwellers in danger.

I hope that what’s coming across is that Fallout Shelter is frustrating. It’s a stressful experience, and often it feels as if you’re just bumbling along from one cock-up to the next.

Initially, the frustration is abated by the intimacy of the experience. With just a few select settlers at your disposal, you can create your own little stories as you get to know them.

In my playthrough, Jason Voorhees came to stay in the vault. With his steady hand at the tiller, the diner was never more efficient. Unfortunately, he perished during a raider attack when the overseer incompetently failed to give out orders because he was busy watching The Simpsons.

Unfortunately, the sole object of the game, beyond the mini-tasks that are rewarded with ‘lunch boxes’, is to endlessly expand your vault. There’s no real end game or aim beyond exponential growth.

The more dwellers you have, the more endless micro-management. It’s hard to keep track of thirty of forty dwellers at once, and it can really damage your vault if you don’t properly allocate jobs.

One aspect of the game I haven’t yet mentioned is that the player can beef up one of their dwellers with weapons and armour and send them into on an adventure in the wasteland.

I mention this, because as Fallout Shelter wore on and it began to feel more like a second job than a hobby, I started to grow envious of the dwellers I was sending out into the wasteland, because they were undoubtedly having more fun than me.

Despite the criticism, Fallout Shelter is a good thing for the games industry. It’s a tiny game made by a huge studio, well polished and satisfying enough, but most importantly it’s free. There’s no pressure to spend like in most ‘freemium’ games. You could play the game for thirty hours and never once feel the need to dip into your purse.

That’s not to say you can’t spend money on it. As I mentioned earlier, the player is often rewarded with ‘lunch boxes’ which contain rewards, such as more money, more food, new weapons etc. You can either earn these lunch boxes by completing tasks, or you can buy them. It’s not something which would make a huge difference to your game, but it might alleviate a bit of the difficulty later on.

All in all, Fallout Shelter is an interesting little ‘indie’-style experiment from a big studio. It starts off strongly, hooking the player in with its whimsical tone and addictive gameplay, but it’s lack of an objective or end game ultimately ruins the experience. Still, it’s worth playing. After all, it won’t cost you a penny; unless you’re on Android, in which case you’re shit out of luck.

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