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Grab yourself a SHIELD Tablet K1 and you get two things. First you get a gaming platform with a crisp HD screen and unmatched power thanks to the onboard NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor. Second, you get a brilliant little game called Fallout Shelter pre-loaded onto your new tablet—along with free in-game loot—so you can experience all the fun of a nuclear winter straight out of the box.
Exclusively available to SHIELD Tablet K1 owners, NVIDIA is giving away a free bundle of five Lunchboxes in Fallout Shelter to the first 50,000 players who register. To redeem your in-game prize, go to the Settings app on your SHIELD Tablet K1, tap About Tablet, then tap Status and then copy your device’s serial number and enter it into this redemption page.
If the word Fallout is ringing all sorts of bells it’s because this is a spinoff of the much bigger franchise that appears on consoles and desktop gaming rigs. In the games from the main series you have to learn to cope once you leave the fallout shelter, in this game, you play the part of an overseer who has to manage an underground bunker, nurturing and protecting the people living in it.
You shelter begins modestly enough with a single reception area and a few lift shafts. It’s not much good for sustaining an underground society so the first job is to get building.
From the build menu you can begin to dig out and create new rooms such as power plants, water refinement plants, diners and living quarters. As citizens from the wasteland rock up outside the vault’s main entrance, it’s your job to look at their stats to ascertain their strengths and then assign them to rooms so that they can start to generate resources for the community such as power, food and water.
This basic balancing act may seem relatively straightforward, but the idea is to keep growing your shelter and increasing your population so things soon get more complex. Building new rooms can be a slow process and it takes awhile to yield the resources you need so you can spend your in-game currency on the Rush option, which allows you to complete tasks quickly. Rushing a job though, carries risk. For example, putting a rush on your power plant could result in a fire, so you have to very carefully assess whether rushing for short-term gains is worth it.
As well as keeping your citizens fed and watered, you must also keep them healthy and happy. From the build menu you can access a large number of facilities in order to fulfill these needs but they only become available to you as your population reaches certain target numbers. Ultimately you will be able to add Med bays, labs, gymnasiums classrooms and gardens. In this way you can add more and more capacity for citizens to survive and thrive.
It all sounds quite idyllic, albeit a little claustrophobic, but it’s by no means all plain sailing. The task of maintaining the welfare of your underground colony is in itself a challenge and more so as it grows ever large. But there’s also the ever-present threat from the Wasteland outside. Not all the resources can be found underground. Additional loot, armor and weapons need to be recovered from the barren surface and to this end you can send your citizens outside to do just that, but they may face an untimely death at the hands of raiders so it’s also necessary to assign some of your citizens to guard duty.
It’s a fascinating process that starts out simply allowing you to grow your vault at your own pace before adding more and more complexity to your subterranean society. The visual design is beautiful too. Every little citizen is expertly animated and the vault itself is crammed with numerous details that really come to life on the SHIELD Tablet K1’s HD screen. The fact that it comes free is the icing on the cake.
Get Fallout Shelter on NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet K1 now.
About the Author
Andy has been writing professionally for 25 years beginning his career on a magazine for the now practically antique Commodore 64 before going on to write for, edit and launch a number of games titles. More recently, as a freelance copy writer he has been making words on subjects as diverse as weddings, cross-stitching, home improvements, accountancy, architecture and chimney sweeps. Video games remain his favorite topic to write about, though.
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