Fallout Shelter

Played this extensively. Steam keeps wiping all my saves after blue screen errors (I'm not sure if any other platforms have this issue), so after a few months on and off I'm just giving up. I've gotten entirely bored of this, but honestly for mobile game standards this is pretty good. If you need a time killing game while you're at work, this is one of your best bets.

I would never really go out of my way to ever play this again, it doesn't even compare to 90% of the rest of the Fallout series, the gameplay is completely different, the only thing actually holding it to the game series itself are just the items, alongside some other vague references to the franchise. Not sure why anyone ever would, but if you came here expecting lore you'll be nothing more than disappointed.

Combat is okay, if incredibly boring and stretched out. It feels like I have to force myself to want to get to the end of every combat situation just to get it over with. Entering any new room of enemies is just a case of "oh please one shot them I can't be arsed with this". If you get lucky and get an overpowered weapon in your first few lunchboxes, you'll be able to speed through pretty much any dungeon early game without a scratch. It took me 2 separate runs to discover "Oh I can tell my dwellers what enemy to aim at?". Overall just a very frustrating experience. "Undercooked" is the best way I can describe this, there's just so many different features in this that feel so underdeveloped. You'd expect them to work on this given how high it is on the app stores, but apparently not.

On that note, lunchboxes are incredibly unbalanced. They decide pretty much your entire experience with the playthrough early to mid game. You're either speeding through every dungeon unharmed, or getting tossed around by every raider that does so much as lay a finger on your vault. No in-between. Despite this, I'd say any point past 100 dwellers, they start to become very useless. The items in these boxes don't scale at all depending on your level, so most of the time (despite the rarity of these! They're very rare outside of the beginning of the game), you're handed what's effectively pocket change, or items so useless that they're immediately turned into it anyways.

Overall, I wouldn't really touch this game unless I wanted a little game on my phone for when I'm bored without internet occasionally, or if I was an absolute Fallout fanatic who just couldn't get enough of the series within any context. Over-hated for sure, but god this pales in comparison to almost anything else within the game series itself, let alone the game market as a whole.

i have never been able to make it past the first 10 minutes. the most boring mobile game i've ever played

I remember when Todd Howard announced this at E3 and saying how it was coming out that night and everyone collectively creamed their pants with all the Fallout hype and people downloaded this game like it was crack cocaine, and I decided to check it out when it came to Android phones a month later, and it pretty much is what I expected. Its a time waster game that has no real objective or goal, it pushes you to spend real money to get better items and upgrade your base, and its extremely slow and tedious. I remember naming my vault 666 and dicking around for a day or 2 before getting bored and then I didn't touch the app for a few months until a girl I was talking to at the time invited me to a church game night event and I arrived 30 minutes before her, so I played it to kill some time, which is kind of funny because I was in a church playing in Vault 666. Then after that day I didn't touch the game for an entire year and think I played it one more time while I was waiting for an appointment or something. I probably won't bother to play the game anymore, even though I get notifications for holidays when the game is pushing me to spend my money, but I probably won't bother to reinstall it on my new phone in a few months.