Fallout Shelter Review (iPad)

Fallout Shelter was announced and released at  Bethesda’s E3 conference.  Fallout Shelter is a iOS only tap to play game that puts you in the role of an overseer of your very own Vault.  As the overseer, you are in charge of taking care of the Vault dwellers, assigning jobs, managing power, food, and water expansion and exploration of the wastelands and protection.

    The main gameplay of Fallout Shelter is building rooms and assigning dwellers to either collect resources or to train their S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats.  Each room as a stat assign to it: food production uses Agility, Strength for power, and Perception for water purification.  As the Vault begins to grow, you will need to acquire new dwellers to maintain larger Vaults. New dwellers are either incoming people from outside the Vault or those being born to the current residents.  All residents have a happiness percentage which will increase or decrease based on the condition of your Vault.  Low resources will lower happiness and start affecting their well being and they’ll start to contract radiation sickness.  

    The basic rooms are the diner, power station, water treatment station, and the residential area which increase the max number of Vault dwellers. Building multiple resource rooms will increase maximum production as well as capacity.  More advanced rooms are unlocked by increasing the number Vault dwellers, like training rooms and advanced version of the basic resource rooms.  Med bays are used to create stimpaks restore health and Science labs to produce Radaways to remove radiation sickness.  The training room are use to increase one stat at a time to improve productivity.  Rooms can be placed next to one another to increase the number of dwellers that can be assigned.  Bottle caps are the main currency used to upgrade rooms and to revive fallen dwellers.  Each production room can be rushed for collection at the risk of failure which will either cause the room to burst into flames or a radroach infestation.  

 

    Sending dwellers out into the wastelands will give them experience and also gives them a chance to find and collect bottle caps, weapons, used for Vault protection from raider attacks, and outfits to modify stats.  


    Fallout Shelter has a fast pace with no wait times for rooms to be built with the ability to modify wait time on resource collection by using higher stat dwellers to the rooms.  It does take some extra time for training and for children to grow up enough to get assigned to jobs.  Resources are  not automatic collected, so if you step away from the game you must keep checking on it.  Dwellers in a room waiting to be collected will stop working.  The game can be played without an internet connection, which it is only needed for the cash transaction of buying lunch boxes that contain cards that can range from bottle caps, outfits, weapons and special dwellers.  Fallout Shelter is a great way to pass the time until Fallout 4 is released this fall.

YouTube Bethesda

60 Minute Review: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (iOS)

By: CJ Boat

In this segment, we play a game for 60 minutes (give or take) and give our first thoughts about the game.  This will of course be followed up with the full review later.

Game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Publisher: Aspyr Media

Platform: iOS

This game is a port of the 2003 Xbox classic by BioWare, ported to Apple iOS in 2013.  I played the heck out of the game back when it was first released, beating it both as pure Sith and Pure Jedi, if I could have gotten achievements, I would have gotten them all.  




I'm always a little leery of ports to mobile as they tend to do odd things to emulate the controls of the original.  This KOTOR doesn't try that at all.  They go for a point/click control system that works AMAZINGLY on the iPad (where I'm playing it) , the graphics translate very well as well, the game looks better than the original version. I'm guessing because there was no pressure and they could focus on fixing the issues that plagued the original, as there are no glaring bugs that I have been able to find.  


That being said, doors are almost all impenetrable so far, but I didn't find them able to be destroyed until later if I remember correctly.  Other than that, it's a fantastic port, even though I am only to the cantina on the first planet, I took time creating my character. This time I'm going straight blaster Jedi, to try something different.

60 minute review score: 9/10