Review: White Dwarf October 2012

A real interesting review this time around as the whole magazine is remade with an new staff, new format and an whole new design. And I must say this was much needed and this issue actually does feel fresh, but is the rest as good as they promised beforehand?

The new White Dwarf
So the format is changed, it's now a little bit smaller, about 1,5 cm less in height but instead has ~150 pages instead of ~120 like before. The whole magazine looks and feels more robust as well as more lavish than previous issues. The cover is nice, I especially like that we don't get white background on the front cover this time as we have for quite some time now. It has a matte background with a more glossy illustration and text, It looks much like the 8th ed. army books and I really like that effect. Other than that the actual White Dwarf  title is also changed and now looks more retro, in a good way though.

Inside the magazine the layout has changed much as well. It now looks less cluttered and more clean in it's design and even though they still promote their new products (and why would they stop that?) but it dosen't feel as forced and obvius as before. Overall I like the new layout and the it feels and looks more like a hobby magazine than a fat GW flyer.

New releases
I think most of you have heard what the new release are by now, it's of course the new Chaos Space Marines. And there is mixed opinions about the new miniatures and I must say I agree. I like the Maulerfiend but not the Forgefiend as much. I also like the new Raptors, Warpsmith, Aspiring Champion, Dark Apostle and Sorcerer. The stuff I don't like as much is Warptalons (much similiar to Raptors but I prefer the Raptors), the Close Combat versions of Obliterators called Mutilators (have never really liked Obliterators either so..). And the big thing that I'm a bit unsure of is the Heldrake, a big robot dragon flyer. I like the look of it but I had rather seen a piloted air craft of some sort, like the Forgeworld Hell Blade Chaos Fighter. As always we also get a good amount of old models released in Finecast among them, Abaddon the despoiler, Ahriman, the old Daemon Prince and more.

I like the cleaner layout in this issue where they show us the new releases, just a picture, some text and that's it no prices or anything (these can be found on an separate page with all the new stuff and prices). I also like the new red and black backgrounds they use for the pictures on the models, and together with red lighting really brings the models to life.

Of course we also get some small pictures of some of the pages from the new CSM codex, which by the way will get the 8th ed WHFB treatment. Meaning that all the future 40k Codexes will be hardback and full colour.

Painting and Modelling

Quite a lot, there's for example very easy tutorials for different  Chaos weapons called Daemonfire Techniques, there's tips for Ork Dakkajets, Heresy-era Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, World Eaters and Deathguard as well as some post heresy marines like Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Black Legion and Red Corsairs. There's also tips on how to paint different rust effects and some tips on how Ben Johnson painted his banners and warpstone. So all in all quite much even if they don't really go in depth on any of these tutorials.

There's also some kit bashing tips for Ork Fight Boomers which is quite cool and there's also some pictures of a nicely built 40k battlefield. Other than this there's tons of Showcases for the new stuff of course as well some other stuff. The coolest thing is some models painted by John Blanche himself. There's also pics of some of the Design studios models including Necrons, Orks, Rangers of Gondor, Night Lords, Death Korps of Krieg and Bretonnians. And for last there's also a Showcase for the enormous Skaven army of the former Bad Dice co host Ben Johnson. With a lot of conversions and really nice painting as well, this was quite a large and nicely written article where Ben talks about how he started Skaven and how he has built up the army, really nice stuff. There's also some really nice Forgeworld pics as I have showed here on the blog yesterday, including Angron the Primarch of World Eaters and plenty more.

Rules and Fluff
Not as much of this in this issue actually. Not that strange though as this issue is crammed with other stuff.

Gaming

We did get a Battle report this month and it's the new Chaos Space Marines (painted as a nice Alpha Legion army) vs. SM: White Scars. I don't know if it's hugely different from the latest Batreps but I did enjoy reading this one, and it's was easy to see what happened in the game. A lot of pictures as well but I would have liked to have some bigger pictures of the battlefield, now it was a lot of smaller pictures and no really big one. I also like the post-battle review where the players as well as three other comments the game and what they should and shouldn't have done in the game. And I didn't see the standard phrase we always could see in the end of the old battle reports "Wow, that's was the funniest game Iv'e had in years, and bla bla." and that was a nice change.

There is also article called the Rivals where two gamers, in this case Martin Morrin with Dark Elves and Adam Hall with Vampire Counts is having a tactical debate on which army is the strongest and if it's best to spread the power across the whole army or have all the eggs in one super powerfull basket (in this case four Vampires in a Black Knight bus unit). Quite an interesting read and both the armies and tactical chat feels much more useful than many in the pasts White Dwarfs.

Conclusion
Wow feels like I could go on and write forever on this review as this issue just have so much stuff in it. Which is great of course, and I found most of it really interesting and I really enjoyed both reading this issue as well as looking on all the pretty pictures. And here's a big change, many models we haven't seen before. Not to mention Angron and some of the new Forgeworld stuff. Also nice to see that GW is looking outside of the actual GW HQ, like when they do a big article about Ben Johnson's Skaven army for example. More of this please. All in all I really liked this issue and there's plenty of stuff for almost everyone (not LOTR players though because there is almost nothing LOTR in here). And after this issue I see a much brighter future for WD and hopefully it can grow and become even better.

Rating: 4,5 out of 5

Forgot to mention you also get this poster with the magazine, and according to WD daily we will get more stuff with our magazines in the future.