Sheltered 12+

If you acknowledged Fallout Shelter was an absurd cash grab with micro-transactions and artificially bloated wait times, Sheltered is the game you actually wanted.

Its super fun, with a high learning curve.

Things that could make the game better:

-Have a mechanism for quickly setting the number for how many items you want to move from one menu box to another. When it gets to high-volume trades, moving 50 items one-by-one gets irritating.

-Add an automatic maintenance bot. Once you have all the tools and 5+ shelter inhabitants, the fear of something breaking down are more of an inconvenience than an actual threat to the shelter. At that stage, it makes sense to offload the responsibility to a bot, so the player can concentrate on missions.

-Add a higher-stakes plot that the player can engage in once they’re locked and loaded with the best stuff. The current “Yay! You can start over!” is kind of lame.

-Force the player to take the offensive once the defensive measures are adequate for steamrolling would-be raiders.

-I got the impression from some of the character designs that people and creatures were mutating over time... which would be totally awesome if that was actually the case.

I have effortlessly put over 40 hours into this game, with less friction than many big RPG titles. The gameplay is addictive and has such a huge variety of things to do, it just clicks perfectly with me. It’s very buggy, but no major catastrophes happened. There were more than a few hilarious surprises in store for me. Let’s just say, be sure your new recruits get out of the vault every once in a while! You don’t want them to get too stir crazy.

I will say that once you get pretty stabilized and into a rhythm the game starts to get a bit tedious, because truly there is no ultimate goal other than to survive as long as you can. Once you get past day 200 or 250 you’ll probably get bored, but it takes quite a while to get to that point and I think the cost of this game is more than worth the many hours of entertainment it provides.

The only caution I would give is that it can be pretty difficult at the beginning to get your shelter established. Be sure to focus on collecting water as much as you can in the beginning, and realize that you need to be pretty much constantly sending people out to gather supplies at the start. There are many excellent guides online to help you out if need be. Have fun!

The game is cool. It’s somewhat more realistic than your average post-apocalyptic survival game. You don’t just pay $2 and get a shipment of gear, and your inhabitants don’t exactly take care of themselves. Even on easy mode, the game is ridiculously challenging, you have to send people out all the time, otherwise, your shelter is going to be a mess of bodies lying in their own filth and waiting for sweet departure.

The game is honestly hard up to a fault. I (personally)can’t have fun unless I look online for guides. I wouldn’t recommend this to a casual gamer, or someone looking to have something like animal crossing that is just an escapist task you do every day.

If you aren’t up for the challenge, be warned!