Reviews are flooding in for Fallout's return on Prime Video - and it's safe to say it's already dividing opinion. After a universally praised first season last year, anticipation was high ahead of Season 2, which launched on Wednesday, December 17. But confidence wobbled before a single new episode aired, after an AI-generated recap video got key details wrong.
Were the doubts justified? Is Season 2 even better that Season 1? Check out the review round-up of Season 2 below.
'Fallout is going in the right direction'The reviews have mostly been extremely positive, earning an impressive 96% Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Daily Beast, for example, said that Season 2 builds on its "wild, weird and badass" first outing.
The Playlist agrees, describing Season 2 as an "exciting second quest", despite an initial "slow burn".
"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-Dworet have succeeded in taking the reins from Season One's Jonathan Nolan and continued to move Fallout right along seamlessly," reads the review.
USA Today praises the cast, particularly lead actors Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten: "[They] have settled comfortably into their roles, and the latter feels distinctly more natural as buttoned-up Maximus this time around.
"[Walton] Goggins and [Kyle] MacLachlan and [Justin] Theroux's natural weirdness fits right into the ambiance of the series."
While the main action is a hit with critics, some of the complex subplots aren't going down quite so well with critics.
The Telegraph writes: "Where Fallout loses the thread is in its many subplots, which are only loosely related to Lucy's pursuit of her bad dad, Hank."
IGN largely agrees, feeling the series falls down towards the final couple of episodes: "It is both a strong return to its uniquely bizarre post-apocalypse world and an admirably authentic adaptation of what made New Vegas distinct among its series peers."
'Goes nowhere, lacks any direction, and too silly'The there are the critics that really hate it, including an accusation by RogerEbert.com that the show of lackis any true direction, especially in its sixth episode.
New York Magazine continues the pile-on, arguing that the plot becomes "so convoluted and so dense that it loses sight of its original animating questions".
IndieWireand What's Alan Watching? reviewed the show negatively, with Ben Travers describing it as "arduous" while Alan Sepinwall offered this worrying verdict: "Parts of the show are too silly to care about at all."
