Fallout Shelter is an adorably demented dollhouse builder, and it's out now

What with all the corpses, cannibals, and culture wars, vaults rarely work out very well in Fallout 4 - but maybe yours will be different. Fallout Shelter will let you build your very own Vault-Tec approved habitat-for-the-remainder-of-humanity on iOS, and you can download it from the App Store tonight.

Fallout Shelter's side-on cutaway view will be familiar to XCOM base builders, though Bethesda cited influences as far back as Little Computer People in its design. It's basically like building and managing your own great big doll house for Vault Boys and Vault Girls (or for raiders and radscorpions if you're not being a very good Vault Overseer).

All your Vault Dwellers will have their own stats and names, and you can even kit them out with new gear from special lunch boxes. That's also where the free-to-play microtransactions come in - you can pay for a fresh infusion of random loot, but Bethesda said Fallout Shelter won't have any annoying F2P hooks like construction timers and energy meters.

Maybe naming all your Vault Children "Dogmeat" will make the wait for Fallout 4's release date slightly more bearable...

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.