App of the Week: Fallout Shelter

This week we look at a mobile game that we thought would just be a fad, but a month later we are still all completely hooked. Introducing ... Fallout Shelter. Fallout Shelter is based on Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic Fallout series. It places you as an overseer of an underground shelter, and tasks you with looking after the various survivors who make it to the safety of your Vault. There is an almost 1950s aesthetic to the Fallout world, all eluding to an alternate high tech history that has been decimated by a nuclear attack. The aim of Fallout Shelter is to build a functional underground community from your Vault’s dwellers. This requires you manage essential resources such as energy, water and food to keep your inhabitants happy. As you start building your subterranean rooms it can all feel a bit overwhelming, but a good few tips and good level progression make sure you start off on the right foot. This ensures you start by creating a power station to power other rooms, before encouraging you to build other essentials such as dining halls and water purification plants. This leaves you carefully balancing your resources, with a lack food or water casing residents to become sick, and a lack of power preventing your residents from being able to do pretty much anything. To keep your dwellers happy you must make sure they have all of the essentials, and be working to unlock their potential. Each inhabitant has specific skills and using or training this skill will keep them happy. So, if you have particularly nimble individual, you will want them working in the dining hall as that is where agility is most useful. Similarly, a strong dweller will enjoy working in the power plant, while more perceptive individuals will prefer working in water purification. Another surefire way to make your workforce happy is to put them together in a social area. Here they will dance and – if you put a man and woman together and they really hit it off – then four hours later you may find you have a new member to add to your community. That's not the rabbits! Increasing the population of your shelter is important, as this unlocks new rooms that allow you to produce healing items, train your people, and, if you build a radio station, attract new people from the wasteland. To further improve your people, and strengthen them against random wasteland raiders, you can send dwellers out into the world to search for for weapons and outfits. Be careful though, it dangerous out there, you will want to check in on them frequently. Here we are completely hooked, and I am particularly proud of my inhabitants who seem happier and healthier than all of my colleges’ – especially Toni’s.