Monday 7 January 2013

Reading Januarys Digi White Dwarf

Having been somewhat un-impressed with 'all-new' white dwarfs second issue, i decided to skip last months hobbit-overload issue and dive back in for January with a more 40k centric issue.

This wont be too in depth, ive only read the bits that looked interesting to read. which, in all honesty, wasnt much.




So as normal its front-loaded with lots of big spinny pictures of the new dark angels miniatures and some write-up on the dark angels, but there really doesnt actually seem to be any content in the words, ive tried reading them and my brain switched off almost instantly. I think its basically 'these are the new units and heres a bit of fluff from the book!' but thats a guess. Theres nothing of substance in there, no design notes or anything.

As a brief aside, i've discussed my thoughts on these with a few of you after seeing the pics spoiled on the internet a couple of weeks ago and my opinions not changed, i dont like the stretch landspeeder, it just looks too blocky and all over the place, especially the one with stupid statue bits. However, i do quite like the Nephilim jetfighter, it looks like a natural progression from the stormtalon, the dark talon has statues on it again though. bleurgh. take that! aerodynamics!
The terminator box looks decent enough, i wouldnt buy em, but they defintely look distinctly dark angels.
The big downer for me though are the price points. How is the dark talon/nephlim kit with £17.50 more than the stormtalon for 2 extra wings and some statues and new weapons? seriously?
How is that landspeeder £40?
How is the terminator kit £35?
I can get 5 cataphracti from forgeworld for that (albeit without weapons, but you get my point)

So as you can tell, im not overstruck with this release overall, not that i expected to be much, ive not been a dark angels fan since i was 15. However, it does occur to me that its been a while since theres been a new codex & minis wave thats piqued my interest enough to tempt me into considering at least picking up the book. The last was probably grey knights with their awesome plastic terminator kit at release or  necrons with their awesome looking flyer for their second wave, and even then, their codexes werent £30 (or £55 for the zero-extra-content LIMITED EDITION!!!!)
Food for thought mayhaps.

End the 'brief' aside!
We then get a few more pages dedicated to some animal miniatures released for The Hobbit.
I Dont Care.

The battle report, i think this might prove to be quite marmite, i read the introduction and expected to hate it, as they decided to do away with such silly concepts as 'points costs' and using the rulebook to set up the battle and mission and just fielded what they wanted and made up a 'Hunt the Fallen' scenario. As it turned out it was quite a good read, and having a less structured battle seemed to suit their looser 'setup-earlygame-midgame-lategame' break down over the old turn-by-turn reports.
The cynic in me did think it was somewhat suspect that they decided to do this 'for fun' when it basically meant the field got choc-full of all the new dark angel fast attack choices and the chaos side had loads of space for all their awesome new heavy support choices and was still able to field a helldrake as well.
That same cynic also found it quite hard to believe the final turn actually went down as it did without a bit of artistic license massaging the dice.
As it was it was a still decent enough read and the post-battle video is still a cool feature in the digi-mag.

Lots more filler followed including a bazillion golden demon winners some of which looked ace, some of which looked less so. I dont think i could be so churlish as to suggest this feature shouldnt be included as its always good for insipration, but id question whether we needed quite so many of them.

The kitbash article that seemed to have so much potential at first was really poor this month
'heres a building we've made from two different building kits! nice!'
err..great?
It wasnt even as if theyd made much effort to show you how to replicate it yourself either, there were no decent shots of the whole thing from the back.
Way below par compared to the first couple of kitbash articles.

The battlefield showcase just had a few wide shots of a battlefield that didnt actually look that good to play on. Again, way below par compared to the terrain showcased in the first 'new' issue.

The paint splatter article wasnt all that to begin with and still isnt now, not that its really intended for us hobbyists who have been playing as long as we have, so i'll give this a pass.

The 'this month in' feature started off brightly at first (with the assistance of lots of lovely pics from HH:Betrayal i suppose) but yet again, this months was well below par in comparison. Nothing much to see other than some preview shots of some new warhammer forge miniatures.

All in all, not great, id advise steering clear unless you want to look at pictures of the new dark angels.

Actually turned out being more in depth than i expected! whoops!

Edit!!!
I totally forgot, standard bearer didnt come across as a snobbish, patronising pile of guff this month. I was so shocked i forgot.
Vetocks article was poor however, and came across as though he'd struggled to think of something to write about.

2 comments:

  1. I think it wasn't as good as it was a few months ago, this new format is more Marmite than i expected. The battle report was good but again a setup for the new flavour to win. I liked the non-standard mission but wasnt pulled off well. best bit was the WD team stuff as it actually show the hobby being done as aside from the rest of the Mag being 'please buy this'

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  2. Only got mine this evening due to GW/Royal Mail! First impression was that they have padded out the mag with pictures of GD models (8 double page spreads!) and all the hobby parts other than the painting guide was too thin to be any use. Why do they persist with the John Blanche stuff? It was partially interesting in the first issue now is just a waste. I like the fact they have taken out the old double page adds but as you say the front of the mag now just has banal comments rather than an explanation of how the unit functions in the army. It is becoming a style over substance printed product, but at £3 I can't complain too much.

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