Sheltered Critic Reviews

If you enjoyed last year’s iOS/Android sleeper Fallout Shelter, but wanted more complexity, less predictable combat and a greater sense of achievement even in abject failure, look no further.

Sheltered is a well crafted game that is quite tough at first to make progress in, but once you’re used to its systems there can be a rewarding experience.

Sheltered is like a premium version of Fallout Shelter, and it's a far more thematically compelling proposition. I love that it makes you be quite ruthless in your efforts to keep your family alive, but then allows you to feel awful when they die. It's less humanising than The War of Mine, which is the most readily comparable game out there at the moment, but it's intense for its own, valuable, reasons.

A brutal fight for survival that's one part The Sims, one part roguelike, and three parts despair.

Sheltered is a interesting game if you want to face a challenge. Sometimes the design doesn't work as expected, but it still is a good option within the genre.

Sheltered depicts the grim, unpleasant side of the post-apocalypse to great effect for its limited resources. That doesn’t stop the game from getting frustratingly repetitive though as there’s simply not enough variety in the game’s opening hours.

Sheltered is a complex post-apocalyptic simulator that relies too much on its randomness, being too unfair too many times.

Sheltered is a post-apocalyptic game that uses minimalist art to achieve the sensation of getting into the atmosphere. It is a unique game whose objective is to survive another day gathering resources, updating our buildings… An indie that everyone who likes strategy must play at least once.

Sheltered's survival of the fittest foundation makes it repetitive by nature, but the ability to customise your family and choose a pet makes starting each new game charming, rather than chore-like.

Sheltered starts off brilliantly, hooking you with the immediate and pressing needs of a family seeking sanctuary against the perils of its post-apocalyptic world, but there is not enough content to reward prolonged play. Once your vault has been fully upgraded, the experience becomes bland and meaningless, veering dangerously close to authenticity of the undesirable sort.

Sheltered is a complex strategy and resource management game which gets a lot of things right. Its presentation creates a palpable atmosphere, while its many relatively simple systems interlock in ways that are both thematically appropriate and mechanically interesting. Unfortunately, those same clever systems sometimes rely too heavily on luck, which – when combined with the title's abysmal controls – often make the entire experience more frustrating than its worth.

Ultimately, we found Sheltered to be engaging, purely due to its brutal difficulty. It’s quite a shame then that its brand of survival is far too often mundane.

Overall, Shelter is an indie game that accomplishes most of what it sets out to do but is ultimately not really meant for a console release. The controls just aren’t meant for this kind of game and coupled with just how difficult it really is, it really took away from a lot of the enjoyment I could have garnered from it.

Hardcore survivalists might find something enjoyable in Sheltered, but the game is too slow and far too boring to get fully invested.