
You see the shelter from a side-on view and can tap the little cartoon survivors to check their status. It’s a fairly simple game to pick up, helped by a clean interface and a concise tutorial. Your explorers might come back with riches, experience and other resources. And if it helps to send explorers out into the wastelands, armed and armoured with the best kit you can scavenge, then do that too. This effectively comes down to just a few things: building rooms to support your survivors, providing the resources those rooms they need to keep running, allocating survivors to rooms to get the work done, while finding ways to keep your numbers on the up.

You are the overseer of one of Fallout’s vaults, looking after the needs of a growing population of survivors, putting them to work and preparing for the future.

It’s a shame that the game underneath lacks weight and comes saddled with some of the usual problems of a free-to-play business model, but as a simple time-waster it’s not bad. While it is, at heart, little more than a Fallout-flavoured spin on the Tiny Tower resource-management sim, it’s been made with respect and affection for the series’ fifties-styled, post-apocalyptic universe, which carries over into every aspect of its look, sound and feel.

Announced and launched at Bethesda’s E3 conference on Sunday, Fallout Shelter is a mobile Fallout 4 spin-off with a little more class than your usual phone/tablet tie-in.
