As we prepare for the arrival of Fallout 4, we’re looking back at the seven games that’ve had the Fallout name attached and ranking them, from weakest to strongest. This 18-year-old franchise history includes the three numbered games and Fallout: New Vegas

Note that this list isn’t based on IGN’s review scores. Our biggest Fallout fans put their heads together and ranked the games based on current stature and overall quality.Without further ado, we begin with the worst Fallout game. (Don't worry - it gets better!)The black sheep of the Fallout family is Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. This linear hack-and-slash action game for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 isn’t terrible for what it is – a poor-man’s Diablo-style loot game – but it’s the kind of shallow, throwaway experience that would have been almost entirely forgotten a decade later if it didn’t have the Fallout name slapped onto it.Bethesda’s first mobile game is Fallout Shelter, a vault simulator. The great news is that it’s free! And getting to play as Overseer of your own vault and supplying your dwellers with food, water, and electricity by digging out rooms is good fun for a while. It’s all about training up dwellers’ SPECIAL skills, then dragging them to the room where their skills will be the most effective, or sending them out into the wasteland to scavenge for weapons and stat-boosting outfits. But the fun ends far too quickly - once you’ve unlocked all the buildings, there’s not much left to do.The followup to Fallout 2 was MicroForte’s Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, which moved the action out to the American midwest and put you in charge of managing a new and growing chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel. Unlike the other Fallout RPGs where you have a single character, this one has you directly controlling multiple characters in turn-based or real-time combat. It’s a strong tactical game, but the linear campaign makes it much less replayable than the mainline Fallout series, and it lacks the dark humor, voice-acted companions, and discoverable side-quests that make the best Fallout games so memorable.Fallout started it all way back in 1997, and is still a fantastic RPG. It established Fallout’s signature dark-and-gritty atmosphere, its flexible character-creation and perk system, and its open-world freedom that lets you explore the wasteland and find its secrets in your own way. Locations like abandoned vaults, Shady Sands, the Brotherhood of Steel’s base, and Junktown all have memorable moments and characters. And the fact that you can shoot anybody at any time, or create a character with low intelligence and grunt your way through the whole story, or become so smart you can convince the villain to self-destruct, speaks volumes about its openness and replayability.Bethesda’s 2008 resurrection and reinvention of the Fallout series was a resounding success. It boldly took us from the traditional third-person isometric perspective into first-person, and let us experience the exploration of the impressively detailed and open DC wasteland in an up-close and personal way. The quest to find your father, played by Liam Neeson, is full of dark and dangerous surprises and suggestive environmental storytelling. Fallout 3 is also famous for introducing VATS, an homage to the original Fallout’s turn-based combat, which allows us to pause real-time combat and target enemy body parts for gory, slow-motion destruction.Black Isle’s 1998 sequel to the original Fallout improved on it in almost every way. Its story is terrifically flexible, and your quest to rescue your fellow tribespeople from the technologically advanced Enclave poses morally gray dilemmas that are perfect for building a roleplaying character. The pop-culture humor injected into the wasteland lightens the oppressive mood, so more than ever before, you can set out in any direction and find something interesting or terrible or sad or funny.Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas combines the detailed open world and first-person perspective of Fallout 3 with the writing, humor, and worldbuilding of Fallout 2, giving us the best of both worlds in one fantastic game. Its excellent story has multiple interesting outcomes built around its many distinctive factions, which lets you have a major impact on the future of the region. It features some of the series’ most memorable companion characters, who all have deep background stories. And it all takes place in a wonderful and varied Nevada wasteland with an Old West flavor that sets it apart from the typical nuclear ruins. It’s our favorite Fallout game yet.

And that’s all seven Fallout games, ranked from worst to best. Did we nail it? Are your personal rankings different? Fill out this quick poll and let us know in the comments.

Our process: These rankings were determined by a small group of IGN editors with tons of Fallout experience: Dan Stapleton, Steve Butts, Tal Blevins, Justin Davis, Ryan McCaffrey, Jared Petty, Destin Legarie, Brendan Graeber, and Jon Ryan. In the event of an irreconcilable difference, consensus within the group determined the final rankings. IGN's review scores were used as a starting point, but opinions on games can shift over time, and we allowed each game to slide up or down these rankings regardless of its original score.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome PC gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.