The Fallout TV show is out now, and critics are loving it

It’s a sure sign of the apocalypse: a videogame adaptation, once a concept so accursed that only Uwe Boll would touch it, has arrived to widespread critical acclaim.

The Fallout TV show arrives on Amazon Prime today, and at the time of writing it’s currently enjoying a 93 per cent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. We’ve come a long way from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

In case you’ve been tightly sealed behind a massive vault door for the last few decades, the Fallout games are set in an alternate reality in which the cold war turned extremely warm and nuclear war all but wiped humanity out.

Only those who took refuge in vaults – and the mutants who found a way to survive the brutal conditions above ground – remain.

The series originated with 1997’s Fallout, an isometric RPG whose frighteningly proportioned rats and stern difficulty level live long in the collective memory.

The most recent release was Fallout: 76, a spin-off that wanted to blend MMO elements with the classic Bethesda open-world RPG template and in doing so found a very effective way to make both those things absolutely joyless.

The franchise needed a win, then, and this eight-episode series is providing exactly that. Starring Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell, it’s teeming with game-accurate details that will have you nodding like an approving parent.

The blue jumpsuits, the power armour, the mid-20th century aesthetic – all present, correct, and crucially, bolstered by a smart script that views post-nuclear society through the lens of a class system. The vault-dwellers venturing out into the wild have previously enjoyed a luxurious existence. Not so for the have-nots who’ve been toughing it out on the irradiated surface.

As if that wasn’t enough to make Fallout fans smile, there’s a free Fallout 4 update for next-gen consoles arriving on 25 April, too.

PS5 and Xbox Series X/S owners will get the choice of performance and quality modes, along with some visual and stability improvements. Plus there’s some Creation Club content thrown in for free, including new outfits.