Prior to playing Sheltered 2, I decided to play Sheltered again to remind me of the original gameplay loop and to make a proper comparison between the two games.
Sheltered is a brilliant management game about a family living in an underground bunker, trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world. You manage the family and their activities, be that crafting, cleaning, building or expeditions.
You'll meet enemies and friends on expeditions and collect valuable resources to help you survive. You then bring those resources and friends (if you find them) back to your shelter. You then use those resources to craft items and upgrade your shelter. Rinse and repeat.
The sequel has expanded upon these activities, for example, where expeditions used to be click a location on a map, choose who goes and then giving them equipment to increase their chances of success and survival, now you get a map and can make waypoints for them. Making sure they go to the edges of the visible map to explore and find points of interest, where you can let the survivors search for supplies and other junk that can be recycled into usable resource. These in turn can be used to craft equipment, supplies and special rooms in the bunker. Other mechanics from the original remain, such as base building and crafting. These mechanics are very similar as the original with some expanded recipes and speciality rooms but otherwise pretty much the same. In the first game you created a family when starting a new game, but in the sequel the family dynamic has been changed into a faction instead and with it comes faction goals. These goals range from crafting set amount of items or rooms, going on expeditions and so on. When you finish a goal you get a bonus and that bonus usually has something to do with the method of completing that goal, for example the crafting items goal will increase your crafting speed and the expeditions goals will either increase the speed you perform expeditions or even lower the supply cost for those expeditions. Making them quite worthwhile to finish and extremely welcome additions to the game. There are many goals to complete and most are completed just by playing the game normally.
The wasteland is controlled by 6 factions that you need to discover and deal with, be it trade, ally with or fight. Then there are all kinds of random events that range from beneficial to down right disastrous. One of the things I really disliked about Sheltered was the bare bones tutorial and the frustration of trying to figure things out because the tutorial was so inadequate, I am happy to say that Unicube has improved the tutorial in Sheltered 2, it is very clear and takes you through the aspects of the game step by step, making the whole experience a joy to play. The main change from the original is the graphics. Sheltered was a charming pixel graphics game whereas the sequel is 3D. This is where I think Unicube has dropped the ball. The new graphics look dated and the animations are stiff, slow and just plain ugly. The graphics look like they are a decade old. Personally I think sticking with pixel graphics or just plain 2D graphics would have served them better seeing as the game mainly plays on a 2D plane and 3D graphics are just wasted on it but that is a personal preference.
Sheltered 2 is a good management/survival base building game with an interesting faction mechanic but lacklustre graphics.
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