My Initial Experience With Warhammer+

Warhammer+ has received mixed reception from the community so far. While I, personally, was not initially a fan of the idea. I thought I'd see what it had to offer and invested the whopping £4.99 for the first month (the things I do for this blog) and was pleasantly surprised. 

I made sure to steer clear of the service for it's first few days of release. Anyone who has used a service on release or stayed up til 4am for a game's multiplayer servers to go live, will tell you to just wait. Doing so, I was able to avoid the litany of issues other users have been experiencing while signing up for, paying for, and using the platform. So here's my first thoughts on the platform after spending the good part of a day delving into it.

Note: I made a great effort to avoid any spoilers and would consider this article completely Spoiler Free so you may read ahead without fear.

Warhammer TV

Quite possibly the main attraction of Warhammer+ is Warhammer TV, Games Workshop's new streaming service. It currently features:

• The first episode of 'Blood and Duty' an interesting 3D animation centred around a command squad of Blood Angels heading down onto a corrupted world to recover their lost Captain.
• The first 3 episodes of 'Hammer and Bolter' a fantastic 2D animation that delivers bite-sized lore snippets and windows into the grimdark universe of 40K with brilliant narrative elements. My favourite of the three is the first episode, 'Death's Hand', following Inquisitor Kiamoro as he fights to defy a deathly fate. Well worth the watch. 
• Two Battle Reports featuring the usual suspects. One see's Nick and his Ultramarines against Patrick's Necrons in a 40K bout. The other see's Nick's Stormcast Eternals against Patrick's Orruk Warclans in an Age of Sigmar battle. Both feature excellent editing, similar formatting, and excellent introductory narrations from Toby Longworth.
• Numerous Tutorials and Classes covering basic techniques all the way up to their 'Masterclass' series that covers more advanced topics like wet blending and skin-tone colour theory. 
• The 'Learn to Play' series, covering the ins and outs of all of Games Workshop's major titles like 40k, AoS, Blood Bowl, and the others. 
• A handful of Cinematic Trailers for recent major releases like 40k's 9th edition and the recently released Kill Team animated-trailer.

All in all, the battle reports and animations, alone,  add up to around 4 hours of content. A little lacklustre but a solid foundation for what's to come. Some of the animations are also of questionable quality in some aspects. Blood and Duty features some of the jankiest lip-sync I have ever seen. My friend also pointed out a completely static dreadnought in episode 3 of Hammer and Bolter that looks very out of place in the scene. Generally though, I have no gripes with any of the content provided in this service.

The Warhammer Vault

The Warhammer Vault is phenomenal in my opinion, so long as you don't mind a bit of reading. It currently features around 50 viewable PDFs covering all range of topics and literature. While I'm disappointed at the lack of Black Library content available on this section of the platform, there is still hours of reading here, such as: 

• Lore: Inside the vault, you gain access to lore in spades. The Gathering Storm series, Santus Reach, Mighty Battles in an Age of Undending War, a handful of Warhammer Underworlds books. 
• Painting Materials: While there is currently only one painting guide, the Vault feature's 30 issues of 'Warhammer: Visions' to seek inspiration from and marvel at magnificently painted models from the editors of White Dwarf.
• Toilet Reading: The Vault also comes with every issue of White Dwarf published since January 2020, for a total of 9 issues (presumably with more to come). So I can say with a fair amount of confidence, that Warhammer+ basically includes a White Dwarf subscription as well.

While I am certainly happy with the amount of content in the Vault at launch, the website formatting leaves much to be desired, with the only page featured in the vault literally being a wall of cover art and zero categoric sorting. I want to feel like I'm in a library, not flipping through vinyl albums at HMV.

Is It Worth The Money?

All in all, in it's current state, for £4.99 a month, absolutely. As long as content of a comparable quantity to what is seen now continues to release, Warhammer+ has a fairly bright future ahead. The service, combined with it's £10 store credit voucher and exclusive model, definitely seems worth the money in it's current state. However, only time will tell if it is able to live up to it's own expectations.

Closing Statement

So this has been a brief rundown on what to expect from the initial release of Warhammer+, along with my thoughts on it's various services. I'm interested to see where things go from here. 
What about you? Will you sub to WH+? Have you already? Have some thoughts? I'm interested to hear other opinions on this controversial new service. Leave a comment using Blogger's awkward system or drop me a comment/message over on my Instagram: @fistfulofbeans.

Cheers for reading!
Ryan