2009/07/20

planetstrike : my preliminary opinion

So I took a look at the new planetstrike book and here are somethings I have to say about it so far:

First of all, it seems to be a nice idea of expanding the rule book with a planetstrike book, since this offers you a lot of new ideas for campaigns and stories. And the rules themselves seem to be very nice, some nice ideas. But here comes the first point:
Even if from a formal point of view, this rules can be applied to games in "normal" size, e.g. 1500points, the rules seem to be made for larger games. It is said in the book explicitly that you may reckon that many of your troops are going to die. Well, I did not like the concept of Apocalypse because for my personal understanding of gaming this was too big and I could never cotton up to this lost of regimentations. Hence, I do not like the idea of being forced to play bigger games to use these new planet strike rules. But never judge a book by its cover, so maybe it can be applied to "normal sized" games without problems.
The introduced scenarios are nice and the tactical options also. But this book lacks (as many books in the recent past) in good color pictures. It seems to become normal for GW to use pictures in their rule books or codices that have allready been shown many times in the White Dwarf or Internet. A good expample was the recent CSM Codex, all the pictures (color with models on it) have been shown in the WD before, disappointing. And this is almost the same in this book, one is really familiar with the pictures, with some (frankly speaking nice) exceptions. My favorite picture is the two-sided picture of a battle Eldar against some Imperial Guard Base, with a broken Baneblade and the Forge World Base on it, the rest is at most average. For me, somebody who emphasizes on such hobby pictures it is very frustrating. In early books you could find some themed armies, armies of some of the staff, nice conversions and nice handmade scenery. But today and in particular in the planet strike book, there a just studio armies, studio scenery (it seems like a pure commercial for those new buildings) and nothing really new. And yes, the studio armies are very well painted, and yes they look good but they do sometimes look like a commercial and GW would not loose its face if they would show something else. For example the Cities of Death codex, the Iron Knights army (blame me, i am starting exactly this army) was - at least in this two-sided picture and full size - something refreshing.

Ok, before start to become to sentimental i will stop this preliminary review here and leave it by the following summation:
The rules and ideas are nice, even though it concentrates on big games but the book itself is disappointing and way below GWs best!

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