Review: White Dwarf Weekly #1 & Wh: Visions #1

When we first heard about these changes I was a little cautious, but I also thought it had a lot of potential if done well. Let's see if I think they managed to do something good out of this change.

White Dwarf Weekly #1
It´s just 32 pages now and haven't as a good quality on pages and cover. This issue mostly covers the new release, which this week is the first wave of Dwarfs. They show them off quite nice I must say, and we see some of the old articles return in this weekly format as well. Jervis talks about how you can do a mini game called Scouting game to decide which one how starts the normal game, quite interesting.

There's an article about Nids called Monstrous Invasion and in Paint Splatter we get the usual mini painting tutorials, this time on how to paint Dwarf armour, gold, flesh and beards. We also get an article about using glue and how to build plastic models, short but actually useful.

We also get something we haven't had in WD for a long time, Rules! We get stats, magic items and abilities for Belegar Ironhammer. We didn't get all though as we don't see what mundane equipment ha has (we can guess though, Gromril Armour etc.)

We also get some info about the Hammerers/Longbeards and we get more little info about Dwarfs in general as well as 'questions' which is then answered. An example is How did you paint the Dragon Slayers striped trousers? we then get an answer how Tom Winstone from the Eavy Metal time painted the stripes.

All in all, the new WD weekly is pretty much like the old one but with shorter articles, and also less of the boring bits. I found this issue to be a quite nice read. Can be because I like Dwarfs but there's some things that's is actually useful here so I must say I like this issue.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Warhammer: Visions
Some of the articles that didn't make it into WD weekly instead found it's home in this new magazine. But first things first.

The format
It has more pages, but is smaller in size. The quality of the pages and cover ís like the old WD so that is nice, When you open the magazine/book you will find the first 63 pages (!) not to be about the new releases like in the old WD (as expected these will be in the WD weekly) but we get last months new releases! Again! Yes we get 63 pages of mostly pictures of Tyranids all which we have seen before, and many are even repeated but taken in different angles and what not. We also get some pics of last months Hobbit releases, sounds exciting? It isn't I'm afraid. We have already seen all these and to see the ordinary Eavy Metal nids again isn't interesting at all.

This is not the worst thing about Wh: Visions though, far from it I must sadly say. Exactly two thirds of all the text in this magazine (and there isn't much) is totally unnecessary for you to read. Because it's just the same text but in another language. All text is first in English then in French and German. I guess GW is doing this to save money (not needing to publish whole magazines in French and German as done before) but that really takes away the premium feel of the magazine and foremost because of this there isn't much text at all.

So what articles did we get in this magazine then? First up is the Army of the Month with an really nice Vampire Counts army, a lot of nice pictures but less info about the army because we get much less text. We get more Golden Daemon entries in Parade Ground, not a huge change here as there wasn't much text to begin with.

We get an Battle Report but I don't know if it's the right name for it. It's pictures of two armies (Chaos Space Marines vs. Grey Knights/Eldar) clashing in battle. Things happen and they try to write a little (very little) story about what is happening in the battle but no more info than. You read this in under a minute if you aren't looking so much at the pictures. Really disappointing.

Kitbash is about Orks Vehicles, same as in the old WD pretty much. Not bad not great. Blanchitsu is doing it's thing again, nice Warband but I think it's a missed opportunity not to mix this article with Kit Bash an doing something bigger. Explaining on how you can try to do your own warband, which bits you could use etc. I would have loved that.

Paintsplatter is about Tyranids, you get to see how to paint Hive Fleet Leviathan, Kraken and Behemoth. What?! Didn't we get exactly those painting guides in January's WD? Yes we did, and sorry for all you Nids players with these colour schemes but I'm just so fed up on those colour schemes by now. Thankfully we also get some painting guides on how to paint different variations of splinter fleets, and these are much nicer I must say.

For last we get ten pages of where you can find your nearest games workshop store, is this really needed?

Blanchitsu could be even better

Conclusion: Wh: Visions has potential, but they really missed out on this in this first issue in my opinion. The lack of text content is the worst thing, sure it can be nice to look at pictures of Warhammer. But you can do that on the web. Without any useful content nice pictures isn't worth the price of this magazine, especially when most of those pictures are stuff you already seen plenty of times before. I really hope they do some big changes to this Magazine, because I can't see myself buying in the future if it continues like this. (have a year's subscription left though :/)

Rating: 1 out of 5