Header image shows the moment I knew I was done with Fallout Shelter. I had just gotten things back on track from an attack of radioactive scorpions, when some death claws came by and took out my defenses, then killed my main power, water and food facilities. Even “Cut-Rate Richard Branson” couldn’t fight them off.
I had 101 residents when I finished — enough to unlock every building, but enough to also make the shelter chronically short of water, energy and food. The shelter always made more than it needed, but the frequent attacks would decimate them and then it would be a long session to get things stable once more.
Most of the 101 people weren’t useful for anything. Their stats were low; training them to be useful took too long, and in the end, I could have lost fifty of them and the shelter would have been all the better for it. I did try leaving a lot of them dead after various attacks, but the corpses underfoot killed the vibe in the place.
If they’d had a Soylent Green facility, my issues would solve themselves. But, alas, that’s the one science fiction trope they didn’t use in Fallout Shelter.
I will miss the expeditions, though. You could send groups of folks out on quests, but you could also send them out individually to explore on their own, taking much less time.
Occasionally, explorers would stumble upon a Super Duper Mart. One I encountered had a Ghoul that insisted I was a store employee and I should be bringing it what it needed right away. Options were like, “I don’t work here, lady”, or “I’ll check out back”, or “We haven’t carried that for a few hundred years!”.
The writing for the game is usually pretty funny. The Christmas quests were cool. If I could do more of that and less of the dealing with devastating attacks on the base part, I would still be playing.
I would have spent real money on an upgrade that stopped or substantially decreased random attacks. But in the end I was spending too much time keeping the shelter running, and not enough time having fun, and so I deleted it.
It has no more hold over me.
But, it did last longer with me than the typical mobile game. Usually I delete them within hours. This one has lasted a couple of weeks. So, for a mobile game, A+, keep ’em coming.
Plus, I learned a lot of casual German. Und das ist das Wichtigste, oder?
I should go check my Fallout Shelter one day. Played it years ago, and turned most of the facility into an AFK stat training ground to pump all colonists to 10 stats. At some point, the AFK-and-watch-clock-to-progress tactic met my sieve-like memory and lost. I haven’t opened the app in forever. Guess the only way to win is not to play.
Oh, you should at least see what they’ve been up to all this time! I’d have had to do some serious training to make half my vault dwellers worth anything in a battle. My best fighter came from a lunchbox.