The "management" aspect is just boring imo, feels like a facebook clicker. Click on dude/click on monster, tell dude where to go/choose employee to do x type of work.
After an employee does his work, abnormality gets a cooldown of 12 seconds or so before can be interacted with again.
My immediate thought was: can i just set a schedule instead? Why i gotta keep telling folks to go back in? It isn't a problem initially when you only have 1-2 abnormalties and you'll be wanting to read the flavor text but later levels you start having quite a bestiary, you'll often be repeating many tasks over and over and it'll distract you from paying attention to what you actually wanna pay attention to. Maybe that's working as intended, but not what I'm looking for in a management sim.
And room placement is fixed. I only have myself to blame for expecting this but when I saw the xcom base style layout I assumed you chose where to place rooms and buildings, maybe even have a form of staff management where gotta keep them sane and fed, maybe give them housing quarters and amenities... 0 of that. Ok not the game's fault but it did end up somewhat annoying me later on when an abnormality I acquired late game would be a zillion miles from my starting department and I just wished in general I could reorganize the layout of my base for a host of reasons. Felt like a massive missed opportunity and ffs this means fallout shelter is more of a management game then Lobotomy Corporation.
Oh and Enrymion was right and the steam reviews i read were exaggerating: you can easily figure things out even without the tutorial and stats being things like justice or prudence. But to give an example, justice: it increases attack speed and movement speed stats and makes the agent more effective at "repression" type work (basically making the abnormality feel bad about itself and tell it to stay in a corner and behave, horror monsters have feelings too after all) . Tooltips and trial and error are enough, the first few abnormalities are chilled and don't actually kill anyone, make people crazy at worst but nothing a baseball bat to the head can't fix. So yeah had to correct that bs I repeated previously.
Honestly once I got into it, the stats and how they related made a certain kind of sense.
So let's say you have an abnormality that is some nightmare fuel creature whose disgust for humanity is only matched by its sheer hatred and hunger for flesh...
Maybe it's not a good idea to try and cuddle it or shout at it to stop being so mean? Even if you pick someone with a high "temperance" (the charisma stat) the abnormality will probably still rip their skin off.
So choose "instinct" work instead which is basically your employee nervously trying to stay alive at all costs and jump away at any sudden movement from the abnormality, and make sure that employee has a high "fortitude" (basically the physical/hp stat). Conversely, adopting this approach with an abnormality with a tragic background who just wants a hug will probably only depress it further and push it to flip out. Stuff like this is the game at its best and really makes you want to experiment and get your next new creature asap so you can repeat this process of discovery.
Since was in a rush and wasn't enjoying game enough to deal with the core game play (what i described above is at best 5-10% of what you'll actually be doing most of the time) and didn't like how game design encourages you to grind and play levels to perfection rather then move on with your losses, used cheat engine to basically make employee deaths meaningless (id max out the stats on the department leaders, give decent stats to a second command, everyone else is a redshirt with whom i played normally, and finally fully refresh this lineup at end of each day).
It didn't prevent the game from throwing me curve balls every now and then even with that : I got one abnormality who always broke out and went on a rampage ripping off people's faces no matter what steps you as a player could do. It was highly resistant to any damage type I had access to and its own damage type went through every armor i could field. RNG had simply screwed me over here and was forced to reload from a previous checkpoint.
In another example I thought a new abnormality was safe enough that I sent one of my department leaders to work on it.. It triggered one of the abnormalities conditions and she died a horrible, gruesome death. If i was playing legit i'd have restarted because losing your best employees is a game ender, but being a cheater I just loled and played on.
Final note regarding the save system. You get a checkpoint every 5 days, by time i had enough i was 2 days off the next checkpoint. Felt I "had" to stay and play because had restarted the previous levels a lot and didn't want to throw away 30-45 mins of gameplay (restarting levels a lot due to losses isn't a scrub thing, also don't forget the end of day extra grinding for equipment which is just boring but necessary time waster), or would if i was a legit customer, as it stands it felt like an appropriate end to the "demo". Uninstalled and added to wishlist.
In conclusion had most fun with the game when I didn't actually have to play it the way it was intended and had freedom to larp. Abnormality design and interaction are cool and kept me playing despite my numerous annoyances with the game.