How Bethesda announced Fallout Shelter and I became a mobile addicted a**hole

When I was in middle school, Tamagotchis were essentially a default status symbol and the ability to bilk your parents into buying you special colored ones was a rigid measure of your worth on the playground. Despite the fact mine usually would die, fluttering all angelic-like above a pile of neglect and their own sh*t, a morbid obsession with simulator games was born in me. This carried me right through several incarnations of Sims and right into last night when Bethesda announced their new free-to-play mobile game Fallout Shelter as the final exclamation point on their impressive E3 Showcase.

Proving again that Bethesda knows how to build a damned game, Fallout Shelter has turned out to be a mash up of the SimCity concept and the XCOM management process while maintaining all the cheeky personality of the main franchise. Pete Hine’s promised us a game without paywall timers and no need for internet connection, allowing for use on iPads and iPods as well. He also later announced that there will be forthcoming information on an eventual Android option.

The game itself is a study in resource management. Food, water and power are your main concerns for supporting your shelter, but you can also create additional rooms that focus on creating med packs or rooms that will develop your little survivors’ stats. Also, because the end of the world gives people special urges, you can toss two of your people into the living quarters and they’ll raise their happiness and then start to reproduce, creating more worker bees for your shelter that you can then name. Eventually, your shelter will begin to look like a damned TLC show, full of brats wandering around bitching about the lack of toys in the apocalypse and bemoaning the fact they can’t visit the casino.

While the game is free to play, they do allow for the purchase of extra lunch boxes which are essentially treasure chests full of things like currency, stat boosting clothing and weapons. This last bit comes in handy given not only is your little world prone to both exploding and being infested by radiated vermin, the bunker also attracts the attention of invaders, turning your efficient little paradise into a deleted scene from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Fallout Shelter is simple to play, addictive as hell and will be a great little distraction while we wait for freshly announced Fallout 4 to release on November 10th of this year.