Fallout Shelter

It one of the most immediately playable games at release I’ve ever encountered, with very few bugs or design flaws. You, dear reader, now have the power to become an all-powerful Overseer yourself. It would be a mistake not to.

Addictive mobile gaming done right. [Summer 2015, p.68]

Fallout Shelter is a decent free-to-play title, as it never begs for money and you can play it relatively easily without spending a dime. It's also a prime example of marketing. By releasing the game just after the announcement of Fallout 4, Bethesda made an excellent example of capitalizing the IP. [Aug 2015]

It’s a fantastic example of how to do a free-to-play game correctly, and the fact it’s made so much money already through the carrot rather than the stick only goes to show what happens when you don’t treat your audience like cattle.

Overall, as casual sim games go, Fallout Shelter is better than most, and there are enough cool Fallout references and motifs to make you smile and enjoy this game, at least for a while.

Fallout Shelter is not a big, complex and ambitious game but it works great as a way to kill some time before Fallout 4. It's fun, atmospheric, offers lots of good gameplay and simply put - keeps you glued to your screen. You can't expect much more from a typical mobile game aimed at a mass audience.

Live out life as a vault overseer in the Fallout universe in this free-to-play management tapper.

Well designed and made, this free app is also pretty fair as for in-app purchases and later levels reachability. The perfect post-apocalyptic companion for your mobile and tablet gaming moments.

Although it’s a bit slow paced, Fallout Shelter is a great experience for mobile gamers.

It's a great game that will help us kill some time while we wait for Fallout 4. Nothing revolutionary, but definitely fun.

Very enjoyable, even addictive. [08/2015, p.78]

In its best moments is like a bag of potato chips: You just can’t stop. There’s a level-up, there you have to collect stuff, you distribute new weapons and play matchmaker for a few couples. But it also has its share of bad moments, where everything is drawn out, where it lacks challenge.

This new iOS game is just like The Sims and other similar simulators, but it´s set in a post-apocalyptic world full of missions and duties to do.

As a Fallout themed management sim for short playing sessions, Fallout Shelter is a nice game to wait for the Fallout 4-release. However, as soon as you put more time in your vault, you will discover you will have to make contributions to Bethesda's vault first.

For those who like post nuclear management Fallout Shelter might be a nice filler between now and Fallout 4.

Regardless of whether I stick with Fallout Shelter to the end, filling a bunker a couple of dozen stories deep with 100 bustling dwellers, I’ve definitely had some fun.

Fallout Shelter is an enjoyable but ultimately shallow experience. It’s set apart from others of its ilk by making its transactions truly and completely optional — though sorely tempting.

Thankfully, Fallout Shelter's nostalgic aesthetics (which imitate signs and other written materials seen in Fallout 3 and New Vegas) mostly outshine the issues of the game's shallow nature.

Fallout Shelter is an interesting game until you reach the fifty dweller mark. After that, the game gets easy and monotonous.

Fallout Shelter is a good way to expand Bethesda's universe, but definitely lacks in depth to engage on the long run.

I enjoyed the game enough to warrant the purchase of a few booster packs (thankfully I managed to keep it at a few). I’m sure that if you spent enough money, your people could live like royalty in a safeguarded oasis, away from all the ghouls, raiders and rad-roaches. But, then what? It becomes a base-building sim just like any other.

Don't get me wrong. I had fun playing Fallout Shelter, and it's a great way to get my Fallout fix while waiting for the next installment. I just feel like certain aspects of the game could have been fleshed out more and that it should be more complex.

Fallout Shelter is a cool concept, and a nice mobile title to pop on to for a few minutes each day (after spending more significant time chunks getting your facility sustainable). It could use some more content and things to do later on; special events, new rooms, or anything else that adds variety and interaction would improve the otherwise pleasant formula.

It has that ability to glue the player to the screen for a good amount of hours, but the lack of depth in gameplay will sooner or later diminish that starting effect.

While it could have exploited fans at every turn like EA tried to do with Dungeon Keeper, it's actually a nice little way to spend an afternoon while you wait for Fallout 4 to come out in November. Just don't expect anything particularly exciting, as it is slightly skewed towards enticing you to spend money on it -- lest you wait to enjoy it in short spurts.

It's not exactly the most exciting post-apocalyptic game out there, but if casual is your bag there's a lot to like here.

Fallout Shelter feels like a solid foundation for a deeper and better game.

What we’re getting at is there’s not much space for classic simulation sadism here. It’s all happiness and accumulation, which is fine and pleasant, but not gripping.

Hit among the f2p strategies is definitely a qualitative leap forward and there's not a slightest reason, why not to give it a chance. But the incomplete design of the game suggests that perhaps developers themselves were surprised by the success of Fallout Shelter more than the players – as the game was just some side project.

And that’s Fallout Shelter‘s big problem: the graphics are great, the coding is great, and the music is great. But working as a Vault-Tec Overseer feels too much like being stuck in middle management: it just gets tediously repetitive after a while.

The experience is enjoyable but once the basic formula has been established it’s just a case of repeating what’s come before on an increasing scale.

Fallout Shelter is a fantastic and interactive diorama full of nods to the franchise that make any fan smile. At the same time, it provides a pleasant experience for anyone who has ever heard the name of the series.

Fallout Shelter is a nice free game for real Fallout fans. The game features beautiful, characteristic Fallout graphics, but is ultimately lacking in action.

Fallout Shelter winds up being a fun experience. Fallout 4 this is not, but Shelter just may tide you over until November.

Fallout Shelter has a well known pedigree, but doesn’t bring anything new to the simulation genre on iOS beyond name recognition and good looks that isn’t really good or bad, but just there.

The game has got a couple of UI glitches, a tendency to crash, and a prodigious appetite for battery power. More abstract concerns arise from the basic limitations of the genre — these micro-session games are too far diluted from the formulas of Dungeon Keeper and Sim Tower to have any real bite to them.

There's a single moment of joy in Fallout Shelter. It comes right at the beginning. [Sept 2015, p.122]