Fallout Shelter - F2P PR for Fallout 4

[Hank Venture]

Downloaded this today, and am already addicted. It's a good game, playable without paying for it (rare for F2P - unlike Simpsons Hit & Run). It's punishing as well, fuck up and try to go for more than your resources allow and you're fucked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMplTXXl7wM

That's the announcement. Are anyone here playing?

[lazarou]

They're all playable without paying for it for the first little bit these days, they like to ease you into the really horrific stuff and you get the bonus side effect of great word of mouth from folks who haven't hit the paywall. I hear this is better than most, though, I'm just really really wary of F2P tactics these days. I'll probably check it out when it eventually makes it over to Android.

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Well that's my YT recommendations livened up a bit.

[Hank Venture]

Bwaha. Shitty youtube and its 'copy at this time in the video' function.

[Ignatius_S]

Played for 3 or 4 days before uninstalling. It's fine, solid enough but as the gameplay is basically checking in often to collect resources, it's very repetitive and no real reward. After restarting once, I found the trick was to increase population slowly, send a couple of people into the wasteland and to regularly collect resources.

I'm not sure if the pay element is better than The Simpsons Tapped Out. Both games don't need you spending money with Tapped Out, if you're OCD about collecting every building and character, you're going to have to buy them - but at least you know what you're getting. In this game, you can buy lunchboxes, which can be also be acquired for free in the game but these are essentially random goodie bags. They mainly give resources, which aren't useful if you're checking the game regularly; if you're not, then they are useful but I think might be running close to getting people to pay so they don't need to check in so much. Lunchboxes will also give you one rare item - in my first game, I got two unique characters quickly (they are about 40-50 to collect) but in the second game, I was getting 500 caps; caps are the in-game currency and this amount is nothing to write home about. Because of the random nature of the lunch boxes, I can see people spending money to try and complete collections of items like special characters with no guarantee of getting anything useful.

I didn't spend money on the lunchboxes, which can be obtained for free in two ways. The first is sending people into the wasteland - supposedly anyway. The collective time of my people searching was probably around 48 hours rt without finding any and so far, what I've seen on in forums, no one has any joy either.

The second way is is completing objectives - you have three active simultaneously and every time you complete one, you get a new another; and you have the option of cancelling one every day (and so get a new one). Objectives are basically what you would be doing anyway and examples are collect 500 water; get six of your people pregnant; assign five weapons to five citizens. In the second example, removing weapons from five people and giving them to five other people counts as success, so essentially you're being rewarded for pointless micromanaging. With the third example, it could take quite a while for that to happen, especially as it's not a good idea to have more than one or two children in the vault at anyone time. It's a crapshoot - sometimes you'll get lots of objectives that can be completed quickly, other times it will take ages. Rewards are usually a meagre amount of caps, but sometime it will a lunchbox and this can be a source of irritation. For example, I got five lunchboxes within a few hours in my first game but in my second game, I only got 3-4 over  two+ days.

Although there are rooms to unlock, giving your shelter more options, what happens in the game is very repetitive and it got old very quickly for me. There's clearly more content that could be added, but even with that, there are plenty of casual games that I think are more fun to play.

[Hank Venture]

After playing some more, I have to agree - the novelty wore off very fast. It's extremely repetitive, there's not really an end goal, and the gameplay is flawed.

[The Region Legion]

I wish I could say it's worn off for me but between slow-downs and crashes, I've not been able to actually play it for long enough to say whether I like it or not.

Fucking Bethesda, can't even get iPad games right.

[Ignatius_S]

After playing some more, I have to agree - the novelty wore off very fast. It's extremely repetitive, there's not really an end goal, and the gameplay is flawed.

That's a good point about the lack of an end goal and I think it's one of the reasons, I knocked it on the head.

I wish I could say it's worn off for me but between slow-downs and crashes, I've not been able to actually play it for long enough to say whether I like it or not.

Fucking Bethesda, can't even get iPad games right.

From various feedback, it looks like people either have lots of issues or none (or virtually none) when trying to play it. I didn't have any technical problems, but there were some design choices that caused some issues. The most striking one is that to move/assign someone to a new room, you need to press them and drag them to the new room but I found that this didn't always work. Maybe it was using a phone and the smaller screen made it more fiddly, but it was pretty annoying. Pretty sure I found a way that you could assign people using menus instead but it seemed rather hidden.

[glitch]

I was really enjoying it but it's "optimised" for iPhone 5+ and so runs like dogshit on my 4S. I don't really understand why, considering it's just sprites. It's got to the point that I can't even load a saved game without it crashing - but it still gives me notifications about stuff I'm missing.