This was another show that I was always going to watch, at least for one season, because of much I’d played the games. It is astonishingly pretty much the best video game adaptation I’d ever seen. It is absolutely crammed full of reference to the games, down to the smallest details, works hard to expand the lore, has enough of a budget to look fantastic and doesn’t hold back on the violence and gore. It’s an amazing ride for fans of the game but it falls short of a truly great series. The characters are well, written for video games, with little real dramatic depth, and the execution of the story is perhaps a little too faithful to the games. I enjoyed this one but I’m going to wait and see what the reviews say about the next season.

Lucy MacLean is a dweller of Vault 33, a large underground bunker, more than 200 years after nuclear war caused the end of civilization. Her father Hank is the vault’s overseer and her brother Norm also lives there. She volunteers for an arranged marriage to someone from the connected Vault 32 but the entire wedding delegation turns out to be raiders from the surface. After they trash the vault and leave with Hank, Lucy decides to embark to the surface in search for him. Meanwhile Maximus is a Brotherhood of Steel aspirant who is promoted to being the squire of a knight. They are sent out to search for a scientist said to have left the Enclave. Similarly bounty hunters unearth the ghoul Cooper Howard to enlist him to search for the same scientist. He promptly murders them all to do the job himself. Flashback scenes reveal that Cooper was a famous action movie actor before the war before he was blacklisted for being a ‘red’.

There are multiple point of view characters and a lot of worldbuilding but all of this will be perfectly familiar to those who have played the games before. It is truly astonishing how accurate it is, from tiny visual details like how the clocks look or the pre-war food items, using the exact same music, and direct references to game mechanics like picking skills and using stimpacks. It’s one of the purest love-letters to fans I’ve ever seen. I also appreciated how it expands the pre-war lore as we have relatively little information on that period and enjoyed seeing more of this strange 1950s yet not version of America in the middle of a Communist scare. At the same time, it’s sure to infuriate fans with one huge change. Since Fallout wouldn’t be Fallout without the wasteland, they had to reset the setting by undoing a lot of progress towards rebuilding civilization to serve the story they want to tell. So goodbye New California Republic. It’s frustrating because every game has the player fix the world slightly and now it’s supposedly all gone.

Fun as it is, the characters are psychologically very simple and the acting in turn is none too impressive. Lucy’s entire schtick is that she is the naive vault dweller who needs to learn to survive on the surface fast. Her goofiness is fine but then they also have every vault dweller being just as insouciant about security, to the extent that someone can just walk in and grab their sole fusion core. I also disliked Maximus’ dumbfounded reaction to events, not able to say anything in own defense at all. As for the combat, it usually looks pretty enough but combat effectiveness is wildly inconsistent. Cooper is sometimes so powerful he can beat an entire squad of Brotherhood soldiers, yet crumples instantly as the plot demands. I can’t believe that the best use of Brotherhood power armor is to engage in melee combat with fists. Sure, silliness has always been part of Fallout along with the gore, but having a character lose a finger only to regain it almost immediately afterwards only makes it feel like the action is inconsequential and there are no stakes at all.

My main concern is whether this show is doing enough to pull in audiences who aren’t already familiar with the games. To me, the setting itself is cool but none of the point of the view characters, except Cooper maybe, are terribly interesting. It won’t be enough to simply keep mining the games for clever references as the show needs to be good enough to stand on its own. So far, I do love how faithful it is and enjoyed seeing the world in live-action, but even I would hesitate to commit to watching a second season since the initial wow factor is gone.