Fallout is huge. Fans from all over the world waited eagerly for the GamesCon releases and for that, they have the Pip boy and some mobile app that debut on the iOS platform and later Android.
At first, you might think that you could have played this game as a teaser to its bigger release but it wasn't. It is a standalone freemium game for mobile.
Freemium. This ugly term is the buzzword of the mobile gaming industry. Free to play but pay to play.
There has been heaps of success factors for this type of gaming. It is social and friends can help you. Unfortunately Fallout Shelter isn't the case. It is, a freemium game that has no social element and this is why it is going to burn and crash.
I played this religiously for 10 days, and boy did I waste my time.
First, the game isn't as exciting as it should be. For one you have to play the part of Immortan Joe, where you decide who to keep and who to send out into the vast wasteland while protecting your valuable food and water resources. You need Cap credits to build underground shelters to house your minions and each room or shelter has a function.
Energy generation is one, the other is food. The last one is food, which is kinda stupid because you operate a diner instead of an underground farm house. You can only have two dwellers in a room and for procreation, you need a living quarters too. The living quarters will also determine how many residents you may have in the shelter.
Now putting a man and woman together in the living quarters will beget you a kid, who in the radiation age, takes 6 hours to grow from a child to an adult. As a child, you cannot assign any duties to it, that means you have a parasite at best. When it grows up, you could sire another child with it depending on who is expendable. This sort of makes you understand why Immortan Joe of Mad Max always kept a harem of women to sire genetically capable children. Unfortunately, any kid born in the shelter is a dufus and has to be upgraded in terms of experience points. Who they fuck matters too as the kid will exhibit qualities of the parents. Not everything will be passed down to the kid.
To make things exciting, you have raiders who break into your shelter to steal stuff and when you send your guys to defend it, they have to be armed. Now how to get weapons? Only by picking them up from the wasteland, and that means sending out your best dwellers to get them. Each dweller has a complicated talent tree. You have strength, charisma, etc, etc and the clothes you wear will give you an additional advantage of each task you assign to them.
Oh, your dwellers can die in the wasteland and there is no action which takes place which you are a party of, you get a status report on how they died and it is up to you to revive them with those Cap credits, which you earn while increasing the experience points of your fellow dwellers. Each time they get an upgrade in experience points, you get rewarded with Cap points as well. So the more people you have at any time, the more Cap points you get to earn and keep. Those points can later go into upgrading the shelter or for reviving dead dwellers from your shelter. Each dweller has a health bar and a radiation bar to watch out for. If the two are weak, any simple disaster can kill them.
I know it sounds boring and it is. I cannot for the life of me understand why they created this game as it just doesn't work. So to summarise the experience.....
#1 Social Element is Lacking
There is no buddy who plays along with you, sends you credits or exchange weapons. You are there with just your dwellers and there will be outsiders who will from time to time come to join you from the wasteland but that is hardly an inducement from a social perspective. The game is solitary, just you and the computer which spits out random problems for you to solve. To keep everything running smoothly, some have said that you need to have 52 dwellers. Then everyone will be happy. It would be more exciting if you could send out your dwellers to raider another's dweller's patch, perhaps steal from them. That would be more fun but nada....it is boring.
#2 Raiders will find a way in regardless of upgrading your Entrance
Raiders will break through your front door no matter how hard you try to fortify it.There are two fighting scenarios, that is to fight the incoming marauders, and to fight the mutants that come to infest your shelter. Think of it as the only interactive experience which doesn't happen often. Most of the time you end up fighting mutant rats and roaches that infest your cookie trail. Is this exciting? Only if you like watching grass grow.
#3 Shelter disasters are Boring
Fire, fire and more fire. Each time you overwork a room shelter, there will be fire. And the fire can kill the residents if their health points are weak. The only way to avoid the fire is to place your resident in the entrance area which never catches fire. And for that, you are only allowed two to a room. Fires do not harm your resources, machine or for that matter, the store room where you stash all your ill gotten goodies.#4 Weapons are all bullshit when fighting Mutants
Weapons can only be obtained from the wasteland. There is no other way. You can't buy weapons because if you did, the mutant roaches and marauders won't stand a chance against you. So that is why the fighting is all BS. You can have, for the sake of getting you to buy more cap points, mutant roaches that will kill perfectly healthy residents armed to the teeth. Picking up a good weapon is a lottery. It depends on your dweller's luck.What would Immorten Joe say about the Game?
Get out into the wasteland.... and bring me back some grub! And stop wasting time on that Fallout Shelter game!!
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