New Android Game Underworld: The Shelter Is A Management Simulator With RPG Elements

Underworld: The Shelter is a new management simulation game on mobile that brings a deeper and more personal idea to the recipe that Fallout Shelter established. Furthermore, it develops many of the RPG aspects that Fallout Shelter kind of glossed over. It is true that there are certain similarities between the two games: The setting is still a post-nuclear-apocalypse world, and you will still be managing an underground shelter from a sideway point of view. However, the mechanics of Underworld: The Shelter is vastly different.

You will see these differences right off the bat upon starting Underworld. The main activities in this game are exploring radiation-infected ruins to rescue survivors (who have been turned to mutants at that point) and collect resources. Of course, things will not be easy. Since these ruins are highly toxic, you have to clear them quickly, or the radiation will kill you. The levels are also full of enemies. Fortunately, you will have a robot as a companion, and it will automatically shoot at the enemies from a distance, but you will still have to control your character to stay away from them to avoid taking damage.

If you successfully do all that and make it back to your shelter alive, you can use the gathered resources to build more facilities, such as a clinic to treat the rescued mutants. Once cured, these mutants will turn back to normal humans and take residence in your shelter, and you will be able to control these residents. The residents belong to different types, and each type is good for a particular purpose, but bad for others. For example, a wanderer is great at exploring, but practically useless in a clinic, while a miner is not an ideal character to send out on outdoor expeditions because of their low speed. Throughout the game, your characters will also level up and gain more stats, which makes them better at what they do.

However, your resources are limited, and you will not be able to rescue and cure everyone. You must choose which mutants that you think will have the best contribution to your shelter and save them only, leaving the others to their own fate. It sounds cruel, but it is what you must do to survive in this harsh environment. This is extremely important in PvP, where players can raid other for resources and residents, and be raided in return. Having a weak team full of low-level characters means you won’t be able to defend yourself against raiders, which can result in irreparable damage to your shelter.

This is a quirky, unique, and low-profile indie game, so you can't really expect much in terms of lasting impact on the Android gaming scene. One thing it does seem set to accomplish, however, is showing that "Fallout Shelter clone" can be a real genre, with enough variation and differentiating game mechanics slapped on. Hopefully, this bold decision will cause the game to become popular enough to spark up a trend and we'll begin seeing more and more games ape Fallout Shelter's delightful core mechanic with increasingly creative twists.

It might be a bit much to expect that Underworld: The Shelter will have a lasting impact on the mobile game market. However, we can hope that this unique game with its interesting mechanics can become a pioneer in creating a new genre of survival games. It is currently available on Android.