After sitting in hibernation for about a decade, the Fallout franchise received a massive rebirth in 2008 with the highly popular Fallout 3. Since then, the series has amassed a huge fanbase and two full-sized sequels. Just yesterday, the next big release in the series was announced — known only as Fallout 76. But there was a little game in the series that was released a few years ago that slipped under the radar.

Fallout Shelter is a completely different type of Fallout game, where instead of exploring the wasteland you command the role of vault overseer and build a vault for survivors to grow and thrive. It’s a free mobile game (with optional purchases, of course), though it was eventually released on Steam too. I don't normally play mobile games, but this is Fallout, so I'm willing to make an exception.

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You begin Fallout Shelter with a bare-bones vault under your command. Your primary currency is caps, which is used to expand your vault with new rooms dedicated to the various needs of your vault. As you add more settlers to your vault, bigger and more advanced rooms are made available to you.

As overseer, your primary responsibility is keeping your vault dwellers safe and happy. this means managing your three primary resources — power, food and water. You can build power plants, water treatment facilities and diners to keep the vault in good order. Let any of these resources fall below the required amount and your vault dwellers will become unhappy and sick.

Each character can be named whatever you want, which is really fun to do. You can populate your vault with people you know, celebrities or characters from your favorite movies. Each character has a unique look and SPECIAL stats (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck) and these stats effect how adept they are at various tasks around the vault.

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Most rooms in the vault produce some sort of resource, wether one of the aforementioned necessities, stimpaks for healing damage, radaway for curing radiation sickness, weapons or armor. These rooms each run on a countdown timer, after which they release a set amount of these resources. You must manually click on the room to collect these resources, until you’re able to acquire a Mr. Handy robot that will patrol a single floor of your vault to collect resources. He can also help vault dwellers defend the vault in the event of a raider, feral ghoul or deathclaw attack.

These raids on your vaults will require your vault dwellers to be armed to deal with these threats. Each character in your vault can equip a weapon, an outfit (which boosts their SPECIAL stats, and a pet. Pets give characters a wide range of buffs, from reducing item crafting time to increasing the likelihood that the character will parent twins.

The primary method of growing your vault is putting compatible male and female vault dwellers into the living quarters, after which they will eventually head into the back and make babies. Pregnant vault dwellers cannot defend the vault in raids or go on exploring missions.

Once your vault is humming along nicely, you can send vault dwellers out to explore for caps and resources, or on missions that reap greater rewards. These explorations happen in real-time, so you might have to wait for 4, 8, 12 or even 24 hours for your team to reach the mission. You can speed this along with Nuka Cola bottles, which can be found on missions or purchased with real-world cash.

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In raids on your vault and adventures, your characters will get into battles with radroaches, raiders, deathclaws and other wasteland creatures. Battle is more or less passive, but its also slow and tedious. A way to speed up combat would have been appreciated.

You’ll continue to grow your vault and get better weapons and outfits, but there’s not really an ultimate goal or ending for Fallout Shelter. Your vault has a maximum capacity of 200, so once you hit that cap I’d say that you’ve essentially completed the game.

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Fallout Shelter is very nice looking, with well rendered and highly detailed environments which are presented in a 2D format, but are in reality a shallow 3D. You’ll notice depth in each room as you scroll around the vaults. The characters all have that ‘Vault Boy’ style, which is perfect for a game like this.

Music and sounds are great, with everything from ambient vintage music, gunshots and various sounds that notify you to things happening in the vault. Nothing to complain about here.

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Considering the game is free, there’s really nothing to complain about here. Its a great game to ‘check in on’ from time to time during your day to see if your vault dwellers have made babies or arrived at mission location. The game does start to get a little sluggish after you add 50 dwellers, and the lag gets worse the bigger your vault gets, but maybe that’s just my underpowered phone.

If you enjoy the Fallout universe or strategy/simulation games, I’d highly recommend Fallout Shelter.

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

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