Review: January’s White Dwarf

The Good Stuff:

Civil War, part 1 of an official Fantasy expansion for games between the same armies; two painting articles covering the Ghorgon and Coven Throne; Jervis talking about playtesting.

What’s In There For Painters and Modellers?

An ‘Eavy Metal showcase (as usual reprints of the showcase section from a new army book); two tabletop level painting tutorials from the hobby team covering the Ghorgon and Coven Throne; an LotR Armies on Parade showcase.

Things I Didn’t Like:

The Vampire Counts coverage was offensingly bad. Back in the days, we had excessive designer notes where the responsible games developer talked in lengthy ways about the style of the armies and why he changed this and that. In the last couple of years, we had at least a couple of paragraphs with interviews with the writers and sculptors about their new book and models. This issue, there is not even that – no interview with Phil Kelly, just straight reprints of rules and fluff from the army book (marked as “exclusive excerpts” from the new book) and pictures of the new models with some comments from one the WD guys, like “this unit is so cool, it can have this and that option and do this and that”. The same bad level as last month’s Beastmen article. The reprints from the army books are good reads but strike me as pretty lazy. Then there is a new VC themed scenario, which is good, but it is used for this month’s battle report, which is a joke – no army lists, no maps, the report isn’t even structured in game turns! Last but not least, there are the sample army lists. There are 11 pages of sample army lists in this issue. A full blown picture, an army list, one or two paragraphs of comments. Who wants to read that?

The Verdict:

All fillers, no killers. This issue felt pretty lazy. The Civil War expansion is nice, apart from that, there seems to be so much filling material: The Vampire Counts coverage, where even the people behind the latest Vampire Counts incarnation themselves couldn’t be arsed to write a few lines. Want to know which aspects of the Vampire Counts Phil Kelly wanted to carve out? Want to know what the sculptors thought when they made such a crazy model as the new Coven Throne/Mortis Engine kit? Too bad, you’ll never know.
The other articles like the Necron tactica or the painting tutorialswere ok, but they were so few in number. And on top of lazily compiled articles you have those constantly appearing double page adverts and a full-blown new releases section, where models like the Coven Throne/Mortis Engine get four (!) pages dedicated and then they even 2 pages of old models there… All in all, I’m not impressed. Some years ago, when Mark Latham was chief editor, I liked WD much more, even though there was room for improvement back then. But at least we had proper ‘Eavy Metal Masterclasses and on top of the magazine almost daily painting and tactic articles on the website… all in all, 3/10from me.

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