Ratings and Reviews by Mostly Useless

Fallout Shelter is too brief to review without spoilers, and if I tagged them all the review wouldn't make any sense, so *SPOILER ALERT*.

Maybe it's because I've watched five seasons of the X-Files in the last four weeks, but it was refreshing to find in Fallout Shelter a brief, humorous and uncomplicated sci-fi story. Perhaps it is for the same reason I am willing to overlook the protagonist's Duchovny-esque lack of emotion upon discovering an underground UFO and its little green occupant.

The game is faintly puzzly, and in my opinion its challenges, while simple, are somewhat unfairly implemented at points (Spoiler - click to show)(searching the alcoves, Mister Gloam, if that is your real name (I know, it isn't), means searching *all* of the alcoves), but the map is confined to the point where you'll only spend a few minutes at most wandering around to see if you've missed something.

There's not a huge amount to say about the plot because there isn't very much of it; there are plenty of humorous touches, however, and a particularly juvenile chuckle (for me, at least) upon discovering the losing ending (Spoiler - click to show)(to clarify, while the winning ending isn't very 'winning-ish', there is another more 'losing-ish' ending which involves, ahem, probing).

This was fun. There's pretty much nothing there, but what there is has been robustly implemented and is well-written and amusing. I would genuinely love to play an extension of this, not with more detail, but just with more situations where you have to hide your elephant for various reasons.

Our nameless detective strikes again, this time stalking the stinking alleys of Chicago - with gangsters! An inventively foul-mouthed cabbie serves to string the locations together and provide comic relief. As with the prequels, the game is not hard, though there are points where death can be sudden, so regular saving is encouraged.

Glancing over the other reviews here, I find myself agreeing with some of the points raised - the game is rather short, and rather easy, and free with use of 'bad' language - but for me these points count in it's favour. I don't need every game I play to be sprawling and require hours of exploring and a constant effort to remember everything that is said. I don't always need to deeply invest in characters and storyline. I certainly don't need an author to censor themselves, particularly when the insults and swears are clearly intentionally ridiculous and played purely for laughs. What I do need is to be entertained, and in this respect Ill Wind didn't let me down. It's a bit of fun - nothing more, nothing less - and for me that's enough.

Marshal Tenner Winter's second IF outing places you firmly in the shoes of a private eye thrown into a mysterious case, and (without spoiling anything the game's tags won't tell you) successfully explores Lovecraftian horror themes from the tongue-in-cheek perspective of the lead character. It's nice to play a game where one moment you're laughing at the dialogue and the next squirming at a grisly description.

There's not much in the way of puzzles, this one's more about the story. My only real criticism would be that there isn't quite enough of it, and there's a few non-interactable items. A bit more work would add a lot of polish, so roll on version 2!