

What’s actually cool about Shelter is that you can “hurry up” activities by taking a chance rather than spending premium currency (like every other game on the market) - the catch is that room might explode or cause an “incident,” which may kill off citizens or spread to other rooms.

It’s all pretty straightforward, but sometimes objectives are a bit broken, as you’ll need to re-do things you may have already completed (specifically in the case of equipping an NPC with a certain item in my game).ĭuring its E3 conference last night, Bethesda noted that it didn’t have any underhanded sales tactics with Fallout Shelter, as it was playable offline “without energy meters.” Now, that’s technically true (it works in airplane mode), but you will have to wait to earn more caps from rooms to actually do anything substantial with your vault other than look at it. Your personal hamster-wheel involves completing objectives and upgrading rooms to earn caps, which in turn allow you to build more rooms to take in more inhabitants, which unlocks more advanced buildings. A low water resource will cause your citizens to become irradiated, and so on. If you don’t keep your NPCs fed, they will lose health and productivity. If you don’t power your vault enough, rooms will shut down. Unlike many games though, Fallout Shelter actually forces you to keep up with your resources. Other than a few nuances like the ability to place male and female NPCs in a living space and potentially create children or ship off inhabitants to scour the wasteland off-screen, that’s it. It’s a lot like SimTower, or its mobile successor, Tiny Tower. As time passes, said NPCs will work and earn you resources, which can be gained by tapping on the location - simple stuff that I’m sure you’ve seen before.

As you play the game, more citizens will line up outside of your vault, ready to suit up and get placed into a new room. The gist is that you’ll basically need to build your first vault from scratch, with a power source, a water treatment plant, and a cafeteria to serve food as a baseline.
