Prior to Fallout Shelter being released on Android devices, I had heard a lot of hubbub about the game and I was excited for its release on a device that I owned. I purposefully did not look up any information about the game and prior to downloading it, all I knew was that you played a person in charge of a vault in the Fallout universe. As it turns out, you play the Overseer who is the one in charge of a vault in the Fallout universe where you oversee the vault dwellers and the further construction and development of you particular vault. That is basically about it. There is no overarching story, at least that I was introduced to after two weeks of playing. The game is primarily about human and resource management.
I actually quickly realized that this was how the game was going to be pretty early on yet I kept playing for an additional week and-a-half for a number of reasons. First, and probably most importantly, I really liked the visual aesthetic of the game. The character design is based off of the Vault Boy from the Vault-Tec Pipboy2000. It's very cartoony. Even the raiders and from a screenshot, the Deathclaws all have the same artistic style associated with them. It's also a very clean looking game and after getting used to the user interface (considering it's on a touchscreen), I became comfortable with how to navigate the various menus and visual cues of the rooms. Secondly, I like the post-apocalyptic universe that Fallout takes place in, with its slightly retro-futuristic design of everything. Like the look of the world is still very 1950s even though it's the 22nd century, even though the war (that never changes) happened around 2060.
I probably spent about two weeks playing Fallout Shelter and then I just stopped, cold turkey and it wasn't intentionally either. What happened was that I had forgotten to check my vault one morning and then didn't have my phone with me the rest of the day. The following morning I realized that I hadn't check the vault the previous day and so I, what I thought was temporarily, put it out of my mind. The third day of not checking, I thought to myself, "You know what? That was a good two week run. I feel like I understood the game without sinking hours upon hours into it, and I'm okay with that."
For me, what I've broken the game down to is a few aspects. You have the resource generators (power, water, and food) and your required amount of food/water is dependent on the number of people you have and in order to have more people, you need to build more living quarters for the people who live in the vault who also work in one of the resource generators based on their abilities (Strength/ Dexterity/ Intelligence/ Perception/ Charisma/ Luck) which then requires more resources in order to keep those sections of the vault operating. Then your vault is open to attacks from raiders, rad-roaches, rad-moles which drains the life of your vault dwellers which requires you to manufacture stimpacks and radaway (anti-radiation medicine) which requires you to have more vault dwellers to manufacture those items, which requires you to have more living quarters, and on and on. If there is an endgame, I certainly do not what it is and it was never made clear. The only purpose of the game was to build more so you could have more which required you to build more.
This realization that Fallout Shelter was a storyless Skinner Box of sorts made me a little sad. Sad to the point that when I realized that I did not want to play any more, that again, I was okay with that. There was never that feeling of "Wow, I guess I'll never find out what the end of the game is like." Sure there are minor goals that rotate in and out as you complete them such as "Collect 1000 Energy" or "Put out 10 Fires" where you might earn 100 caps (in-game currency used to build more facilities/resource generators) or a lunchbox that includes 4 items, but I felt that those were there to give the daily grind some meaning in the short run.
With Fallout Shelter, I do not feel that there is a "in the long run" to this game. And again, that made me a little sad. And so I stopped playing.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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