Apocalypse War Zone: Pandorax Review

[xnickbaranx]

I haven't seen any real banter about the Pandorax Apocalypse book here so I figured I'd link you guys to a review I did on my blog.

 

http://2ndcitywarzone.blogspot.com/2013/11/review-apocalypse-war-zone-pandorax.html

 

Here's some details my review diidn't cover that would be of interest to DA players, but the full review talks more about the campaign itself and the fluff.

 

I calculated it at about ~23 pages of fluff and a quarter of that (about 6 pages) focuses on the arrival of the entire Dark Angels Chapter a small contingent of Grey Knights coming to the rescue of Pandorax.

 

The signature battle - 'Rescue the Revenge' heavily involves the Dark Angels arriving to thwart a Chaos boarding action on the Imperial Emperor Class Battle Ship - The Revenge. The table they used for the photo shoot for the scenario is fantastic.

 

The Dark Angels get one Finest Hour, one Stategic Asset, and two Datasheets. Despite not getting a lot of dedicated rules, they do get a lot of attention in the photos and the like.

[Dark Bjoern]

After Damnos i was a little bit disappointed about Pandorax. The whole layout looked a bit loveless in comparision to Damnos.

And i find it distasteful to make promation for Battle Fleet Gothic now that they have removed all specialist systems from their product range.

[xnickbaranx]

After Damnos i was a little bit disappointed about Pandorax. The whole layout looked a bit loveless in comparision to Damnos.

And i find it distasteful to make promation for Battle Fleet Gothic now that they have removed all specialist systems from their product range.

 

I only flipped briefly through Damnos, mainly to read the Ice World Terrain Effects so I don't know how the layouts compare.

 

Personally, I loved that they used Pandorax to maintain all of that fluff from BFG in the background. I don't think its a bad thing at all. It would be a waste to see all of those ideas thrown in the trash bin. Plus, as someone who owns most of those ships, I can recreate all of those conflicts that I want so for me its a win-win.

[Polythemus]

it would seem that the DA only get one cool rule, the thunderhead squadron which allows a squad of three d-shrouds, 1 vengence and 0+ models of landspeders to use the d-shrouds to block line of sight including the space between the models. otherwise the flyer rules (facepalm) have you take 3+ d-talons and one nephillim to cause a stasis chamber which prevents unts from action depending on how many models are dropped on them. this rule seems fairly wasteful to me it should really have utilitized shooting the blind gun rather than one use bombs for little effect.

 

are the missions themselves any good? i wont be getting the rules and book myself but i thought that some of the chaos and catachan rules seemed cool.

[Master Avoghai]

The missions are fine.

 

The "Save the Revenge" could be nice for a club in term of terrain project and team modellling as well as original to play.

 

The only that seems odd to me is the one happening in the caverns and allowing flyers and barrage weapons... :blink:

 

The DT squadron seems indeed wasteful as you need at least 4 operational DT to make it useful...

 

But it's not the worse : who will have 3 skull lords to play the triad or 2 warhounds to play the titans duo?

 

In general this book is ok for a DA geek... But you really have to be a fan boy to be happy with it : the fluff is not top quality written, some apoc sheets seem here just to say that there are new apoc sheets.

Like I've said, some of the missions are fine (I like the multiple table one) and you have nice adds on for jungle fight. But that's it.