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Monday 11 June 2018

=== Mobile Game Review - Fallout Shelter - City Builder / Base Management - 9/10 =7=

I can't believe I've held off on reviewing this game for so long. I've played Fallout Shelter before, uninstalled it out of frustration, and now here I am playing it once again. It constantly draws me back in no matter how much I try to resist.


Welcome to Fallout Shelter. You are the new overseer of vault *insert number here*. It is now your task to build a shelter and keep an community of people alive and well with everything out there in the wasteland trying to get inside and kill you in some way; or perhaps everything will go down in flames.


Fallout Shelter is a game where you begin with a few dwellers and you are tasked with putting them to work to gain resources and grow your population. To start, you must balance three resources which are power, food, and water. Power is the most important resource because all of your rooms require power to run and they will shut down if you don't have enough. Food is the next resource which is needed to keep your dwellers healthy and to naturally heal their wounds. Then you have water which is needed to keep your people from being irradiated which lowers their maximum health.


Once you have these under control, you can start thinking about expanding your population. For this you need money which is most easily gotten by completing quests and rushing rooms. The downside to rushing rooms is that there is a chance to fail which causes some sort of hazard such as fire or enemies to attack the room. Every time rushing a room succeeds, the chance to fail gets higher... but the rewards increase as well.


Now that you have money and a growing population, you'll need to think about keeping your people healthy and treating the radiation from the enemies that enter the shelter and the wasteland itself. Stim packs are used for healing injured people and are used to fight off radiation poisoning. These are very important as the enemies get stronger and radiation is more common as you explore further into the wasteland.


There's such a balance of resources and actions which must be managed to succeed at this game. And at any point it's so easy to completely forget about that high-level dweller you sent out into the wasteland hours ago and is now dead. You'll lose your most important things by sending out high-value items with a high-level character who'll die because you forgot to bring them back home before you went to sleep for the night. You'll run out of resources and lose your base from expanding too quickly or building your base in such a way that one catastrophe spreads throughout your whole base and kills all your people. This game will frustrate you so much, but for some reason you'll keep coming back to it because you just thought of a different way to do something which might work better than last time.

This game is absolutely addicting. I'm giving it 9/10 for how amazing it is. Sound design is good, art style is fantastic, and gameplay is top-notch. The only thing I'm taking a point away for is the controls. In a crisis situation, it can be VERY difficult to select the correct character and send them to the right spot... so you'll lose characters because you tapped the wrong person or didn't manage to select the right guy in time before he lost his last bit of health. Despite the occasionally frustrating controls, I absolutely recommend this game to everybody. I'm still playing it... again.

~ Kyle Welykholowa 

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