=== 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 

=== Reactor - Mobile Game Review, Idle City Builder - 6/10 ===

     Welcome everybody to my review of Reactor, what I would call an idle city builder. I have quite a bit of experience with idle building games as I have a phone and a lot of spare time to kill at times. I mean, sometimes I just want to open a game, upgrade some things and close the game. Yay, I feel like I'm being productive and progressing through the game because I'm now getting more than I was getting before!

     Unfortunately with this game, it's just not the best example of this style of game in my opinion. There are some games where you have to press a single button to progress faster than if you were to leave the game to itself. This game has a lot of buttons to press... at first. When you start playing Reactor, you have to build windmills which stay alive for a period of time until they run out and then you have to click them again to bring them back to life. During this lifespan they create power which you must then press another button to sell this power for money. This is all quite a convoluted process which isn't really all that much fun as the game starts.

     As usual there are a lot of things to buy which progressively make more and more money, but as with most games of this type, they're locked at first until you reach some sort of goal or pay an unlock fee or something of that nature. Sooo...

     Then you learn about research. This is another type of building which you can create which will make research points every second. This research can be put towards many different things including the ability to sell this power automatically. Alright, so now we can make buildings which automatically sell some power for money, but they take up a lot of space, and none of this is feeling fun to me yet. Research now leads into other types of power which can be created as well, but then things start getting really confusing and suddenly you realize you don't have any space left and you have to wait quite a bit of time to remove objects in the landscape which are in the way.

     The game seems little complicated for an idle game to me compared to the other options out there. I'm sure there are people who would enjoy this type of thing, but this isn't really what I'm looking for when I'm looking for a mobile game. I just find the way this game tries to balance certain buildings with the space that you have a little frustrating; especially when it makes me wait for 4 sets of 60 minutes every time I want to remove a mountain or a tree in the game.

     This isn't an awful game; I would play more of this game if I didn't already have better and more fun games to play. I'm going to have to give this game a 6/10 because doesn't catch my attention, but it's not bad.

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Adventure Town - Mobile Game Review, Idle City Builder - 10/10 ===

     Hey everybody, it's time for another game review. Recently I had my phone cut off; as a result, I haven't really been able to keep up with Idle Heroes because you need to have an active internet connection to be able to play. So I had to start searching for a game which would be lots of fun to play without getting bored of it, and which could be played without being connected to the internet at all times. After some searching, I came across Adventure Town.

     Adventure Town puts you in charge of a little town where you must build shops and houses to gain gold and direct your heroes to defeat monsters and complete quests to earn experience and progress further into the game. As you play, you have little heroes and townspeople who will go to each shop and "buy" items. As they visit the shops, they make gold for you until the shops run out of goods at which point you must restock the goods. As with many time-based games like this, an observant person will note that shorter timed tasks such as growing wheat over two minutes will make more goods if you're constantly playing the game, but will be less effective if you're only checking up on your game once every hour.

     Growing these plants makes goods which are given to the shops which then make you gold so you can buy more buildings to make more money faster. You can't go wrong with making more money. There's also the option of building houses which make money without needing goods. The downside of using houses is that they take quite a bit of time to make the same amount of money that could be made by growing plants and stocking shops... but they're quite useful if you're only able to check up on your game once or twice a day.

     Making all of this money doesn't just go towards building more buildings. In your spare time when you don't have room for more buildings and you're waiting for resources to upgrade these shops and houses, you have to do something to keep yourself busy. At these times you find yourself needing to use the heroes at your command to complete quests that you're given or to just plain kill creatures for either money, resources, or magical elixirs which are used to craft and upgrade things. These heroes can be defeated in battle and then must take a recovery period before they can be used again, but they can never die.

     As you gain levels, the monsters you face get stronger, have more health, and do more damage. This is one of the uses for all that money you're making; upgrading equipment to have more health, defense, or damage is incredibly important if you're going to get anywhere in a world like this. Some of the strongest items require crystals which you can earn over time by defeating monsters or completing bounties. The rest of the items cost simple gold which we already know can be earned easily enough. Upgrading items consists of buying new items and fusing weaker items with stronger ones to upgrade them once you've fused enough together. The new strength of these items can be used to fight creatures or to increase your chance to be successful at completing quests.

     I think the reason I like this game so much is because it reminds me of a game I played once upon a time. I can't seem to remember the name of the game, though if I saw it I would definitely recognize it. The whole premise of the game was that all you could do was build shops and buildings to help your heroes and you could influence their decisions, but ultimately it was up to them to decide what they wanted to do; similar to one of my favorite games called Majesty. Seriously, if any of you happen to know what game I'm talking about, feel free to let me know. I would love to find this game again and see if I could get it to work on a current computer.

     All of the monster-killing you do in this game goes toward the great purpose of upgrading your guardian statue. The purpose of which is to give you money once a day which increases each time the guardian levels up. More money means more buildings and better equipment for your heroes which means more monsters destroyed.

     As with most mobile games, this is a pretty simple game to play with not a lot of action and just enough going on to keep you busy if you kept the game open to kill some time. No consistent internet connection required, a good pace of progression to keep you interested, and reasonable tasks which aren't too difficult to complete. This all makes for a great mix of gameplay which would keep you coming back for more as often as you can.

     Adventure Town gets a 10/10 from me for being another great game which is likely to keep me busy for a few months without looking for something new.

~ Kyle Welykholowa ^_^