Fallout Shelter was announced and released at  Bethesda’s E3 conference.  Fallout Shelter is a iOS only tap to play game that puts you in the role of an overseer of your very own Vault.  As the overseer, you are in charge of taking care of the Vault dwellers, assigning jobs, managing power, food, and water expansion and exploration of the wastelands and protection.

    The main gameplay of Fallout Shelter is building rooms and assigning dwellers to either collect resources or to train their S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats.  Each room as a stat assign to it: food production uses Agility, Strength for power, and Perception for water purification.  As the Vault begins to grow, you will need to acquire new dwellers to maintain larger Vaults. New dwellers are either incoming people from outside the Vault or those being born to the current residents.  All residents have a happiness percentage which will increase or decrease based on the condition of your Vault.  Low resources will lower happiness and start affecting their well being and they’ll start to contract radiation sickness.  

    The basic rooms are the diner, power station, water treatment station, and the residential area which increase the max number of Vault dwellers. Building multiple resource rooms will increase maximum production as well as capacity.  More advanced rooms are unlocked by increasing the number Vault dwellers, like training rooms and advanced version of the basic resource rooms.  Med bays are used to create stimpaks restore health and Science labs to produce Radaways to remove radiation sickness.  The training room are use to increase one stat at a time to improve productivity.  Rooms can be placed next to one another to increase the number of dwellers that can be assigned.  Bottle caps are the main currency used to upgrade rooms and to revive fallen dwellers.  Each production room can be rushed for collection at the risk of failure which will either cause the room to burst into flames or a radroach infestation.  

    Sending dwellers out into the wastelands will give them experience and also gives them a chance to find and collect bottle caps, weapons, used for Vault protection from raider attacks, and outfits to modify stats.  

    Fallout Shelter has a fast pace with no wait times for rooms to be built with the ability to modify wait time on resource collection by using higher stat dwellers to the rooms.  It does take some extra time for training and for children to grow up enough to get assigned to jobs.  Resources are  not automatic collected, so if you step away from the game you must keep checking on it.  Dwellers in a room waiting to be collected will stop working.  The game can be played without an internet connection, which it is only needed for the cash transaction of buying lunch boxes that contain cards that can range from bottle caps, outfits, weapons and special dwellers.  Fallout Shelter is a great way to pass the time until Fallout 4 is released this fall.

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