Quick First Impressions on "Fallout Shelter"
Oh, dear. Can I get a "Not another Pay Gate/Resource Clicker" clone here? Actually from what I've gathered... there are no pay gates.
You start out with a vault in the ground that you can give a number that's three digits long. You follow some routine tutorials that tell you what to do, how to manage your vault and how the vault dwellers work inside the vault. The first thing that came into my mind was "Ok, where is the button to spend crystals/donuts to quicklyy finish an operation? Thankfully there wasn't one. While everything is timed, it's not a pay wall timer. You can actually choose the option to 'rush' the operation with the chance of the room catching fire.
Cool, right? Now you're on your resource management and it's awful. You have four resources to manage.
- Electricity
- Food
- Water
- Population
And the rooms used to lay out the vault seem like they can get the job at maintaining the resources well. You got a generator room, water treatment room, cafe and room quarters. You think that if you build enough to meet demand, things should be good to go, right?
Not really. You see, the electricity, food and water resources need to be COLLECTED MANUALLY. This wouldn't be a problem except every time you leave the game, your resources will actually go down on it's own. You're required to gather the resources once they're ready to be collected. To give you an example, I had electricity and food all the way to the max and water just barely over the comfortable line and decided to close the game out for the night. When I checked it out the next morning, EVERYTHING bottomed out and the vault happiness meter went from 64% to 12%. What resources I could gather didn't come close to the comfortable level and I had to wait every three minutes to collect from the rooms again until the meter got up. And once they were finally up at the level I was comfortable with, I realized that leaving the game would only put me in that situation again because the resources would go down on it's own.
On the other hand, the game is unquestionably beautiful and well crafted. The vault inhabitants are cute, the environment is spot on and there's a lot of perspective that really makes the vault feel practical. It's just a shame it's one of those "constant attention" type games where you cannot simply watch the day to day functions of your vault like you could your Sims Tower from the original Sims Tower.
