Outside of the finale most of this season felt like world building. Episodes 3-6 felt like a side quest to the main plot, so hopefully S2 is it a bit more steered to whatever the end goal is.
Walton Goggins, unsurprisingly, was the star of the show and this got really obvious when sharing the screen with Lucy and Maximus. He ran circles around them with his presence and acting. I knew Lucy as the vault dweller was gonna be a goodie two shows so it'll be fun to watch her naive idealistic self really get the reality of the wasteland. Maximus, cannot stand. Whenever he was supposed to be leading scenes I was just bored. He seems to just luck out into everything and his character is just boring (but then again the Brotherhood really shouldn't exist at this point and I blame Fallout 4 for that). Hopefully they can do some work for him in S2 but he just did nothing for me and I was hoping that the obvious fakeout of him not being dead wasn't going to happen.
I am stoked, however, for season 2 to give us New Vegas. Gonna be weird without the NCR (and presumably Legion), but getting Yes Man and Mr. House will be fun. It's the best game in the series so I'm excited to see where they go with it.
On the flip side of that excitement, it's Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Westworld had an amazing first season and turned into dog shit after that, never able to regain its footing and stride after a masterful first season. I hope they learned from their mistakes so I'll be cautiously optimistic for the rest of the series.
Overall, id rate the first season as a strong 6.5/10. It has a great foundation built but now that the world building is done and we have an idea of where the plot is gonna be going I hope they can keep up with the good from the first season while ironing out some of the weaker aspects of it. Definitely one of the better video games adaptations, will tune into the second season mostly for Cooper and how Lucy grows and changes as a character with him leading her through the wasteland.