The Sims Mobile and Fallout Shelter App review

Life simulation games help are almost necessary for anyone for a busy life. What better way to take the edge of you daily hustle by playing an easy virtual substitute.

With that in mind, I decided to take a look at two life sim apps for Android and iOS that offer two different settings for the genre: The Sims and Fallout Shelter.

The Sims Mobile

Perhaps looking to increase its audience numbers on PC, EA has released a version of the The Sims Mobile that strives to please the smartphone market.

Players start off by creating a Sims avatar, customise its appearance and then head out into the virtual world. At that stage you start to fulfil the desires of your little virtual tamagochis by providing with things such as houses, activities and (as one random example) roommates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcDy1CCd-F8

The problem is, The Sims Mobile doesn’t offer as many features as its predecessorThe Sims Freeplay. Freeplay offered more house customisation than its successor, such as the ability to build 12 rooms in a house or own 40 properties through the entire city. You could also multiple sim families, whereas Sims Mobile plays more on renovating homes.

Forget owning pets and a wall around your home; The Sims Mobile also suffocates the number of rooms you can build and limits the amount of property you can own.

Not all is bad in Mobile as it edges closer into deep facial and body customisation. It also puts paid to the days you waited hours for your sim to finish a few real-time tasks, as they finish these within seconds by using an energy bar.

★★★☆☆

Fallout Shelter

Fallout Shelter has been around on mobile since 2015 and became available only recently on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. Unlike the core Fallout RPG games, Fallout Shelter plonks players in the jumpsuit of a Vault Overseer whose job it is to provide shelter to people wandering the nuclear-blasted wasteland and to protect their Vault from raiders and other nasty creatures.

The player’s tasked with growing and building a colony by recruiting wanderers who they can equip with weapons and armour. They also build rooms that produce electricity, water, food, as well as living quarters for baby making- that being the primary way of growing your colony, by the way.

Unfortunately Fallout Shelter soon becomes repetitive; the most fun players will have with it beyond building up their Vault involves sending their  dwellers out into the wasteland to collect caps and fight raiders and beasts. Other than that, all their human ant-colony will be doing is bursting resource bubbles and breaking rocks to extend the size of the Vault.

★★★☆☆

Verdict

The Sims Mobile and Fallout Shelter occupy the same space, and really, it all depends on which setting one prefers. That having been said, to my mind, Fallout Shelter takes the edge, since players aren’t funnelled towards paying for in-game loot with real money. Hell, it’s tough enough in the wasteland already.