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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
43
Mixed:
11
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianApr 11, 2024
The Daily BeastApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Like its inspiration, Fallout is a monumental achievement of sci-fi world-building, presenting an alternately horrifying and exhilarating vision of a United States held together by little more than duct tape and Wonder Glue, unflagging optimism and ultra-violent mercilessness. At once accessible and intricate, familiar and unique, it blends brutality, romance, intrigue and wide-eyed awe—and unites man, machine and mutant—to craft a mesmerizing fantasy of the end-times, and all the wild delirium that follows it.
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The PlaylistDec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
There’s no denying the depth; with countless titles within the world of “Fallout” from which to scrape material, it’s a complex story to tell, yet Season Two showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dwonet have succeeded in taking the reins from Season One’s Jonathan Nolan and continued to move “Fallout” right along seamlessly.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
A bright and funny apocalypse filled with dark punchlines and bursts of ultra-violence, Fallout stands up there with The Last of Us among the best game adaptations ever made. Brilliantly constructed, its three distinct leads travel through cleverly linked storylines that build to a fantastic finale. Along the way, there’s a megaton of treats for long-term fans thanks to immaculate production design and attention to detail, but never at the expense of making this an ideal starting point for the uninitiated. It’s another special effort from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and easily earns a big thumbs up.
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Dec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Both Parnell and Moten have settled comfortably into their roles, and the latter feels distinctly more natural as buttoned-up Maximus this time around. Goggins and MachLachlan are utter delights and Theroux's natural weirdness fits right into the ambiance of the series. .... If you can stomach all the splattered guts and noseless monsters, you won't be disappointed by the enrapturing story the series is starting to unwind.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The show takes the right risk in affording Lucy specificity as a character, and therefore a defined personality that can measure up to the wacky mayhem of the other weirdos she meets. The show’s clearly committed to being the definitive Fallout adaptation, a love letter to fans, no question, while still opening the vault door to welcome in just about everyone else brave enough to step inside.
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Apr 10, 2024
Dec 16, 2025LooperDec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Some points in the last episode I watched left me with questions about whether certain cynical arguments were being put forth by the show itself or just the characters therein, so I'm not yet ready to make any declarative thematic statements about the season until I've watched it all. What I can say is they have me hooked, and even at its darkest, "Fallout" is still a fun time.
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SlashfilmDec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It remains to be seen where exactly this is all heading, and whether "Fallout" can stick the landing. Still, if the first six episodes of season 2 are anything to go by, the show has earned our goodwill with a thrilling, hilarious, and visually stunning story worth sticking with.
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The TelegraphDec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Where Fallout loses the thread is in its many subplots, which are only loosely related to Lucy’s pursuit of her bad dad, Hank. .... But things improve immensely whenever it’s just Goggins and Purnell as an R-rated version of The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, wisecracking their way across the desert.
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ColliderDec 16, 2025
Apr 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
You don’t need to have played the games, or lived through the Cold War, to appreciate Fallout as a television experience. When the final scene teased the location of what looks to be Season 2, the gamer in me cheered—I know exactly where they’re going. The television viewer in me rejoiced, as well. Another season? Okie dokey!
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Radio TimesApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Unfortunately, though, that writing does sometimes fall short, particularly in the more emotional moments. As is the case in a number of Jonathan Nolan’s big-screen productions, certain lines come off as unnatural, lacking humanity, which threatens to derail the stakes at times...That said, this isn’t necessarily here to bring the most emotionally gut-wrenching series of the year. It’s here to have fun, and in that regard, it’s a resounding success. We’re glad this one made it out of the vault – it’s been well worth the wait.
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EmpireApr 10, 2024
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Tonally, this series splits the difference between last year’s game-to-TV offerings “The Last of Us” and “Twisted Metal.” While it’s neither as somber as the former nor as madcap zany as the latter, “Fallout” mines an approach with room for both humor and pathos. With a raft of unfolding mysteries, protagonists we care about and a quest we want to see through to the end, “Fallout” is well situated to grow the loyal fan base that has kept the video game franchise going for 27 years.
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The Mercury NewsApr 10, 2024
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Its final episodes feature several exciting twists and reveals that reshape our understanding of the story we've been watching for eight episodes — but there's little real resolution to any of the ongoing character arcs, and in some ways this all feels like lead-up to a more thorough and philosophically complex Season 2.
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RogerEbert.comApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The willingness to break narrative predictability is admirable, but it kind of hurts the momentum, making the 8-episode season feel longer than it is. It also takes a long time for any performance but Goggins to make an impact. By the end, I liked what Purnell was doing. But this is really The Walton Goggins Show, through and through, to the point that it dips when he’s not on-screen.
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Dec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
When the show is cooking—when we’re with Purnell, MacLachlan, or either version of Goggins—it’s easy to be reminded of what was worth missing about this series in the year-plus since we last got new episodes. That push and pull of cynicism and idealism remains bracing, just as the similar war between the show’s comedic and horrific impulses keeps either side from dominating. When we don’t have those anchors, though, it’s easy to feel the show veering off the rails.
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Dec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It’s not that the season has any weak links in the cast — it doesn’t — but Goggins’s performance is so strong, and the Ghoul’s story line so expanded, that few others really feel like they are meeting him at his level. .... Fallout feels increasingly indebted to that previous series [Westworld] in ways that makes me worry it could sooner, rather than later, become so convoluted and so dense that it loses sight of its original animating questions. .... How Fallout chooses to end its second season, with a third already confirmed, will do a lot to affirm or deny these parallels.
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Radio TimesDec 16, 2025
Season 2 Review:
With all of these subplots warring for screen-time, plus the fact that our main characters are waylaid multiple times on the way to New Vegas, one word is cemented in my mind that defines Fallout season 2’s first three episodes: meandering. That’s not to say that there isn’t some entertaining stuff along the way.
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The IndependentApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
What Fallout lacks in narrative coherence it makes up for in sheer cyberpunk chutzpah. That may leave non-gamers a little baffled, but for those already invested in this atomic dust bowl, it should prove a satisfying, if not sensational, extension of the franchise – just about more bang than whimper.
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IndieWireApr 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“Fallout” skews closer to “Westworld” and “The Boys,” parceling out puzzles to be played over eight episodes and dropping morbid jokes about everything from decapitated heads to exploding penises. There’s also an anti-capitalism message that takes shape over the season’s latter half (in yet another example of Amazon having its cake and eating it, too), all of which gives Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner’s hourlong drama topical talking points, but only surface-level substance.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
That most of Prime Video’s Fallout consists of getting sidetracked by bullshit is simultaneously one of its main charms and one of its most frustrating flaws. At its liveliest, the sci-fi adventure captures the fun of simply getting to explore a strange new world, meeting colorful characters and going down mysterious rabbit holes. But the lack of urgency also means its eight hours take an awfully long time to get where it’s going.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
But if it’s one thing to work as a TV show, it’s another to work as a good TV show, and this standard proves tougher for Fallout to attain. It has some fun components, and the great Walton Goggins (Justified, The Righteous Gemstones) delivers as usual in a dual-ish role. But a lot of it feels like it’s trying way too hard to grab your attention, all while so many of its ideas are recycled not from video games, but from other, more interesting post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows.
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LooperApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The main issue here is that none of these characters are complex or engaging enough to root for. They're two-dimensional, empty avatars that someone would choose at the start of a game — which, ironically, could be a backhanded compliment given this is a videogame adaptation — but while you can get over shallow characteristics and vague backstories when playing (if the gameplay is diverse and challenging enough), the same doesn't fly when you're watching a story unfold on the screen. Based on its first four episodes (which were provided for review), there's nothing in "Fallout" that feels original or impressive.
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The PlaylistApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Fallout amounts to its Vault Boy concept art—the Monopoly-aesthetic-looking smiley thumbs-up character the game is famous for— with blood splattered on top of the colorful image as if that ironic disparity is meant to be enough. It’s not. Fallout may look the part and nail the video game’s cheery optimism/dog-eat-dog inhumanity mein, but by its umpteenth attempt at making this funny—Glen Miller big band cliches overtop of a transmogrified giant fish trying to eat a young squire!—you want this one trick mutated pony to die a quick and painful death already.
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