Welcome to Vault-Tec, you have been selected to be the Overseer at Vault XXX, congratulations! With your help and foresight, you will guide the people of your vault to become the best of the best! Please take a seat here as we explain more in-depth what tasks and expectations we have for you in, Fallout Shelter.
Alright so let's start this off on the right foot and make sure you know exactly what you'll be jumping into. Shelter was originally a mobile game that got ported over to consoles without much change. The game itself is completely 2D and stylized in a cartoony way to mimic the vault-boy we all know. Once you start it up, you give your vault it's number and get to work building it out to best suit the dwellers. Things start out simple enough but the game does add some more complexity later and plenty of tediousness too.
Three meters at the top of the screen must be managed well otherwise your vault will start to deteriorate. These meters are; power, food, and water all of which have a corresponding room that must be built to create these resources. Your dwellers are then assigned to these rooms and given how many dwellers and their given stats will determine how fast these resources are made. Just like in the main Fallout games, your dwellers' stats are measured by SPECIAL, so for example the generator room benefits from dwellers with strength so a higher strength stat dweller will do better there. Later on, there are rooms you can build that improve the SPECIAL stats over time so don't feel like you're stuck with their beginning stats forever. You can decide what rooms to build and where they go, but ultimately you'll likely start optimizing your layout as 3 of the same rooms built together will offer the most space and resources for your dwellers/vault. There are some rooms that can be replaced once their usefulness is met like the barbershop, once you get the achievement associated with it, get rid of it asap and put something useful in its place.
The dwellers themselves can level up and be equipped with new clothes and weapons which you'll quickly find are necessary. The clothes all have stat buffs that can be swapped fairly freely between the dwellers, though there are some that are sex specific. Weapons are absolutely needed as the more you build out your vault, the greater the level of dangers can come knocking. Things start off easy enough with radroaches or mole rats, but then raiders come barraging in as well as feral ghouls and a couple more bigger threats too. As you progress, naturally you'll gather better clothes and weapons and additional dwellers too either through folks showing up, getting the dwellers to procreate, or from quests. Pets can also be found that offer their own benefits like increased dweller health or reduced costs for crafting. They can go on quests too but while they have an attack animation, I can't confirm if they're actually doing any damage.
Once the Overseer's office is built, this allows you to send your dwellers on quests instead of just chucking them out to the wastes and hoping they find some good loot. These quests typically ask for 3 dwellers at a certain level and weapon damage to first head to the area... which can take several hours, then you move the dwellers through the location to reach their goal. At best you can gather resources like junk, caps, and new equipment as you traverse these areas. Although these areas suffer from only having about 5 different building types to traverse through so you'll see the same layouts pretty often. Once the quest is done and you've explored as much or little as you want to, you then have to wait for the dwellers to return to your vault which can again take hours. This is definitely a part of the game where it's mobile nature shines through as the game doesn't want you to play it for a couple hours at a time, it wants you to maybe play it a couple times a day for maybe 30 minutes during those times simply because there isn't enough to do after you've done your chores for awhile.
These small times where you play the game gets you into the rhythm of; gather your vault resources, level up your dwellers and move them as needed, maybe deal with a threat that pops up, send/receive people for quests, manage your inventory, come back to after a few hours. Occasionally either from quest rewards or reaching your daily rewards goals, you'll get a lunchbox which is effectively a loot-box. The vast majority of what is inside is crap like 50 caps or some resources, you're mostly going to be praying to RNJesus that you get a legendary dweller. There are legendary weapons and clothes, but since you can find and craft those, you're going to want those dwellers the most as that is THE ONLY WAY TO GET THEM. This sucks, it really does as you need 20 of them and when you can only get them through these boxes and Bethesda will happily offer you more boxes for cash at any time, it hurts this little game more than it should.
Since it got ported over, we also got achievements too and oh man... if you choose to go down this path, know it's a long path. There is a nice initial burst of achievements but there are a handful that demand you play for dozens of hours. As mentioned earlier, there are 3 achievements related to getting 20 legendary weapons/clothes/dwellers but waiting on getting those dwellers will take the longest. Then there's another that requires you to complete 100 quests but the problem there is at max you can only send your dwellers out on 3 quests at a time and the getting there and returning literally takes hours. You can speed up the returns with quantums you'll find but I would highly suggest you be frugal with those and maybe only use them for themes so you can get all of those knocked out slightly faster when you've got two or three recipes left to finish. Overall, the achievement hunt here is best described as rolling a bolder up a seemingly never-ending hill, it's not the most difficult but the tediousness of it may take the wind out of your sails.
Fallout Shelter can offer a time killer slot and really shouldn't be viewed as much more. While there are small bits here and there that are nice like a weekly quest that quizzes you on your Fallout 3/4 knowledge, know these bits are few and far between. I would be a little more lenient on this game but how much time is asked and the reliance on the loot-boxes for legendary dwellers to get all the achievos, and tedium brings it down. It looks like managing your own vault isn't what it's cracked up to be and you may be better off leaving this one in the fallout.
1.5