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Game essentials: Fallout Shelter

We take a closer look at the App Store’s must-play games.

Fallout Shelter

A Better Life, Underground

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What if the Fallout games didn’t send you out into a deadly post-apocalyptic world at the start? What if you stayed underground instead, tucked away in the relative safety of your nuclear bunker? Imagine no longer: Fallout Shelter has the answer, and it’s an incredibly compelling one.

This game puts you in charge of a tiny refuge that grows into a thriving community. As the boss, it’s your job to build up the shelter, get it running efficiently and welcome more survivors from the wasteland outside, giving them a safe new home and a job in your underground enclave. It might sound complicated, but your ultimate goal is really quite simple: try to keep everyone happy.

Assign survivors from the wasteland to the rooms in your shelter best suited to their skills.

Thankfully, all your dwellers are SPECIAL. Each of those letters represents a different statistic: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. To get the most out of your growing population, you’ll need to put the right people in the right jobs – not only for efficiency’s sake, but because they’ll naturally be happier doing things they’re good at.

Try to keep your dwellers as happy as possible.

So you’ll want your smartest minds in charge of making Stimpaks (medical kits) and Radaway (anti-radiation jabs), while charismatic types can be put to good use when you build a radio station, broadcasting your location to bring more dwellers from the outside. Those with reserves of Endurance and Luck are your best bet for wasteland expeditions: the former will keep them alive for longer, and the latter should ensure they return with a better haul.

Build rooms that produce key resources like food, water and power.

There’s a lot to think about, so thankfully the controls are wonderfully intuitive, letting you check on rooms and individual dwellers with simple taps. The same applies to collecting water, food and power when each room has reached its maximum yield.

There’s a constant sense of forward momentum and discovery that makes Shelter so absorbing. Before long you’ll feel confident enough to expand and welcome more dwellers. Some of them will even pair off and make their own little dwellers. And you can boost their intelligence by building a classroom, teaching them how to work smarter.

With a simple tap you can collect resources and check on rooms in more detail.

It gives you a satisfying feeling that you’re not just building an efficient base, but a community. But even within these reinforced walls, danger is never too far away, with raiders sometimes arriving in packs to attack your shelter. These are a tense and exciting change of pace, as warning sirens blare and you quickly drag your strongest and best-armed dwellers into position to deal with the threat.

The dangers of the wasteland sometimes come a-knocking.

There are other tricky situations to handle, too: if you’re running low on power, water or food, you can choose to hurry things along by tapping the ‘rush’ command. Speeding up production carries a risk, however, and you risk an outbreak of roaches, or even seeing a facility go up in flames if the invisible dice don’t roll in your favour.

Rushing your dwellers’ work can backfire.

But that’s the point: this is a game about putting out fires, and over time you’ll learn how best to avoid impending disaster and adapt to any unfortunate situations that do arise.

Fallout Shelter makes it fun to zoom in and people-watch.

In the moments when everything’s running like clockwork, you can zoom in and just watch your dwellers go about their lives. You may well find yourself growing attached to certain individuals, inventing backstories for them or just lavishing more attention on your personal favourites.

Though it’s the end of the world as we know it, Fallout Shelter makes us feel fine. Among all the doom-laden survival games about death and disaster, it’s an uplifting reminder that life finds a way.