Hello and welcome back to The Backlog, the weekly column where I review video games based on a certain genre each month. It’s the last edition for January which ended up being a short month for us, so we’re closing it out with a title that comes from a much bigger franchise: “Fallout Shelter.”
Available for mobile devices and most consoles, “Fallout Shelter” was released in June 2015 by Bethesda Softworks to prepare audiences for another title that would come out later that year: “Fallout 4.”
Although it’s a smaller game compared to its first-person counterparts, “Fallout Shelter” was nominated for many awards at the time and is the 2016 winner of the D.I.C.E. Awards as Mobile Game of the Year, along with being the 2015 winner in Best Handheld/Mobile Game for the Golden Joystick Awards.
The premise of all “Fallout” games is that you are placed into a post-apocalyptic world set sometime in the future. At some point in human history, several nuclear bombs were set off and the Earth was ravaged as a result. Some people retreated to underground vaults designed for such scenarios created by Vault-Tec, while others scoured the surface in search of supplies. There are also humans and creatures who were mutated by the radiation from the bombs. Humans impacted by the blast are referred to as ghouls.
Although the franchise is dark and most of the games have scary elements, “Fallout Shelter” takes a backseat to this trend and places you, the player, in charge of your own vault as an overseer. The graphics are reminiscent of a 1950s cartoon or advertisement, as they’re meant to resemble the franchise’s mascot, Vault Boy, a blond boy wearing the vault uniform, often depicted with his thumb raised.
As an overseer, it’s your job to expand the vault and provide for each of the dwellers within. This involves maintaining three gauges: power, food and water. Rooms can be created within the vault to produce each of these necessities, and by placing dwellers within each room, the production of each one is sped up.
Basic rooms like the power generator, diner and water treatment produce stuff for each gauge, but they can only be upgraded so many times and certain dwellers perform better in certain rooms. Dwellers are measured not just by their level but by their SPECIAL stats, with each letter representing a specific trait. The traits are strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. Dwellers with high strength do well in power rooms, those with high perception do well in water rooms and the ones with high agility perform best in food-producing rooms.
Building rooms also require caps, which is the currency in this game, represented by soda bottle caps. More rooms can be built aside from production rooms. Some like the medbay or science lab can create stimpaks for healing dwellers or RadAway which can get rid of radiation damage. Both of these require dwellers with high intelligence.
Barracks and living quarters can be built to allow more dwellers to live in the vault, and as the overseer you’ll quickly realize you need as many hands as you can get. The game limits you to up to 200 dwellers.
There are two main ways to gain dwellers. The first is to place a male and female dweller in the living quarters. If they are not related, they will eventually reproduce, and the female dweller will become pregnant. She’ll be pregnant for about three hours, after which you can welcome a brand-new child into the vault and can name them. It takes a few more hours for that child to grow into an adult and be useful to the vault.
The other option is to gather dwellers from the outside, whether through quests or the radio station room. The radio station requires dwellers with high charisma, and it can either extend to the surface or just within the vault. Having it send radio waves gives you a chance of a dweller responding to it and arriving at the vault, but enemies may also answer the call.
There is always a chance of an emergency occurring in the vault. Sometimes it’s fires, radroach or mole rat infestations, but other times, enemies come from the outside. The vault may come under attack from aliens, raiders, feral ghouls and, the worst of them all, deathclaws. Equip your dwellers with outfits that raise their stats and weapons to protect the vault.
The main way you can find outfits and weapons is by adventuring out into the wastelands. You can send your dwellers individually to explore for a certain amount of time, and they also have the chance to encounter certain areas. After building the overseer’s office, you can begin to send your dwellers out on specific quests with rewards.
“Fallout Shelter” is one of the most popular games from the “Fallout” franchise, despite being very different from its other iterations. The beauty of “Fallout Shelter” is that everyone can enjoy it and get sucked into the experience, which is exactly what a successful mobile game should do.
Rating: 5/5 Caps
