Sheltered Reviews
Nuclear family.
Despite any faults listed above, don’t get the wrong impression: Sheltered is a fun and challenging game, especially if you’re willing to put a lot of time into the game crafting the best shelter possible.
If you like Fallout Shelter and you want something with a few less smiles and a few more painful deaths, Sheltered will tickle that morbid itch. Managing its multitude of interconnected systems requires a deft touch, and while its difficulty isn't for the faint of heart, there's a real sense of accomplishment in keeping your growing troupe of survivors alive for days on end. While not as effective as other forays into the well-trodden post-apocalypse, as well as being a victim of its own procedural generation at times, there's still a morbid curiosity to its pixel art survivalism.
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. Just be prepared to lose people along the way.
Overall, Shelter is an indie game that accomplishes most of what it sets out to do
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.
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 pits the player in a post-apocalyptic setting and there are plenty of options on how to deal with those horrible, new circumstances. Unfortunately the game is not very user-friendly and a lot of the game's mechanics and actions often go unexplained when some simple tutorials could make a big difference. The game is also difficult to interact with, which does not make the experience more enjoyable.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
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's 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.
Hardcore survivalists might find something enjoyable in Sheltered, but the game is too slow and far too boring to get fully invested.
Despite average graphics and audio, ‘Sheltered' really drew me in and I couldn't put it down.
Bleak, brutal and exhilarating
More than just a case of survival, Sheltered pushes you to grow and eventually thrive, and the moment your little unit starts to become somewhat self-sufficient, you’ll feel a real swell of pride
An extremely addictive and fun life-simulation strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Sheltered offers a well balanced implementation of the most necessary micromanagement requirements. Beautiful pixel art, music, and sounds bring the shelter and each character alive with retro flare. All that feels missing is the addition of more craftable items, a larger map to explore, and expanded dialogue scenarios. A solid 8/10 for Unicube's first video game.
Sheltered makes for an engaging time killer in short bursts, but very few of its survival themed mechanics serve in benefit to the overall experience. Where Scenario actually makes good use of the premise, Survive suffers considerably due to poor RNG, a tedious loop, and a difficulty curve that, while adjustable, does very little to accommodate newcomers. There is an admittedly strong thematic cohesion between the gameplay and atmosphere, but this doesn't do nearly enough to do its premise justice.
I had a lot of fun with Sheltered. Its micromanagement system and post-apocalyptic setting were very appealing and made this a great survival game. There’s plenty to do in this one, and you’ll end up having to do several runs to survive long enough for you to get all trophies in the game, so it definitely has a lot of replay value. I hope my Sheltered review has shown you if this is the type of game for you to add to your PlayStation 4 collection!
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.
Sheltered is a good game. You can manage your own bunker, you can scavenge around the nuclear world, but while you are doing this, you have to protect your family. The game lacks of emotional sometimes, but it is more than Fallout Shelter and less than This War of Mine.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
As a whole Sheltered isn’t too bad but I’d say the biggest hurdle it faces is in differentiating itself and proving it is more fun/challenging/engaging than its competition on the console. Since it isn’t very action-oriented it can’t compete with the likes of Don’t Starve, Flame in the Flood, or Crashlands, it lacks the emotional depth and gravity of This War of Mine, and obviously compared to Fallout Shelter it isn’t free and while it doesn’t bug you trying to get you to pay for things it also isn’t nearly as polished. In the end it’s just a decent, though somewhat lackluster, survival sim that has its moments but doesn’t do enough to stand out very much in a crowded eShop.
Sheltered is an interesting take on the life simulation game. Its main issue is the fact that since it was first shown off various games have appeared that do too much of what it does, thus the wind has been taken from its sails. It does enough different, but it never fully escapes the shadow of comparison.