Fallout Shelter arrived on Android devices on August 13th, so I’ve finally had a chance to dive right into managing my own post apocalyptic vault! Suffice to say, Fallout Shelter isn’t just a pre-released, bare-bones mobile/tablet app intended to generate hype. Fallout Shelter is a free quality game that will have you constantly checking your phone or tablet, just to see how your vault dwellers are doing.

I have had an absolute blast with this fun little game so far, and I’ve been playing it for a little over a week! I find myself frequently checking in on it in order to gather resources and to check on the overall status of my vault. The very act of clicking on resources and gathering them is fun with the nice animation of the resource going into your resource bars, accompanied by appropriate sound effects depending on the resource gathered.

As with all Fallout games, the game oozes charm. It has the fun art and personality of the post-war 1950’s culture that all of the Fallout games exhibit–even your vault dwellers have the ‘Vault Boy’-esque look to all of them. If you zoom into rooms where your dwellers are working or occupying, there’s a cool 3D model of the room and you can catch snippets of the goofy dialogue between your characters. My favorite are the goofy pickup lines they tell each other when put in the bunkhouse together.

You can build up your population of vault dwellers in two ways. You can welcome potential dwellers who will find your vault and petition to come inside, and you can also produce babies by pairing a male and female dweller together in the bunkhouse. These children will eventually grow up to be productive vault dwellers.

As you build up your population, different types of rooms will become available to you. Over time, you will unlock rooms that can be utilized to train your dweller’s SPECIAL stats up, creating the best survivors possible. But don’t forget that each room puts a strain on your power grid, so plan accordingly!

The productivity of your dwellers at their assigned post is dependent on their S.P.E.C.I.A.L stat. The traditional stat system of the Fallout series stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intellect, Agility, and Luck. Each resource-generating room bases its productivity off a particular stat. For example, for rooms that produce power, the Strength stat is needed, so you will want to put Dwellers with a high strength stat in a room that generates power. These stats can be improved via outfits that you can find out in the wastes.

One of my favorite parts, though, is sending out a dweller to explore the wastes, as this is how you can find the really good equipment. You can load them up with your best gear, along with a large backup supply of stimpaks and RadAway, and they will go into the wastes to find weapons and outfits for as long as they can. It’s your job to know when it’s a good idea to recall them. When you do, they will begin making their way back to the vault with all the gear they found. You will then be able to redistribute the weapons and outfits gathered to your various dwellers.

The longer your dweller can last in the field, the better the loot!

The game does have microtransactions in the form of lunch boxes. These lunch boxes contain 5 cards in them that have random resources and rewards. The final card is always a ‘rare’ card with either a rare Dweller, Outfit, Weapon, or sometimes a bunch of money. While you can occasionally earn lunch boxes by completing objectives, you can also purchase them for $1.00. However, Bethesda has done a great job of not being “in your face” about it. The location where you can make these purchases is tucked away from the main interface, so as not to be obnoxious.

You can find Fallout Shelter on iOS and Android devices. I recommend checking it out, especially if you’re into the Fallout series! Hopefully it will be enough Fallout to tide me over until November when Fallout 4 comes out.

Just a little toasty!