I’m sure everyone is aware that the past week Planetstrike was released for all,  I got my grubby nerd hands on a copy and grabbed a friend and decided to get a game going and write a review for anyone who cared to read it. So here it goes.

First impressions: The book is pretty much the same as the Cities of Death in outer appearances but with different Imperial Guard being slaughtered by different aliens in a grim dark battlefield, though this does not diminish it’s coolness. The book is about the same thickness as Cities of Death as well and pretty much the same colors. Let’s get some greasy warham finger prints on the pages.

The Inside: The pages are pretty standard for a Games Workshop book, pretty nice with rockin’ artwork of Space Marines kicking ass and taking names, which now that I look at it, it’s mostly pictures of Space Marines fighting things.

The opening stories and excerpts really set the mood for your little plastic men to assault the little plastic ramparts of the enemy little plastic men and speak of much baddassery in store. The full color pictures of models also inspiring with different ways to build your awesome new bastion kits, other than pictures though it has little to no modeling tips, just rules and strategems.

The rules themselves are pretty well done, simple but with a good bit of possible arguments for those who want an even larger advantage (but when isn’t that an issue with new products), it’s also pretty open about making custom buildings for non-Imperial races, it just tells you to use some sense and balance. One of the biggest differences in this game type is that all units can score, yep that’s right battle tanks can sit on top of an objective until it’s reduced to a twisted molten hunk of steel.

The six mission types in the book range from a normal take the objectives game type to “The planet is falling apart we’re all going to die!” mission. The strategems you get to use are pretty sweet on top of it all, there are some standard copies from Cities of Death and plenty of unique ones broken up into attacker and defender to give you opponent a hard time.

One of my personal favorites is the Planetquake Bomb, which can shake bastions right out from under the enemy with brutal strength 10 hits and bring troops to a stand still with pinning tests, others include ramming meteors into the planet, raining boiling acid from the sky, and laser traps. One improvement I do like is that mine fields aren’t the static “hey don’t come here” waste of time that they were before, now you just target a unit and BOOM, those unlucky bastards just took a stroll into the mine field and it stays there the rest of the game.

The First Game: I decided to give Planetstrike a go with a friend of mine running his Imperial Guard as defenders and my Chaos Marines as attackers. Terrain set up for the defender can make for a stunning array of defenses and bulwarks for you plastic men to break themselves upon for your enjoyment. My opponent even though he read the book didn’t quite get the Drop Zone rule where my troops could enter play from any table edge. He decided to set up most of his defenses in one direction.

He was quite surprised when two units of Khorne Berzerkers came marauding within charge range of his bastions. The surprising thing is, those bastards lasted until the end of the turn, I finally got chainfist terminators into it and managed to crack one and powerfists got the other. What I assumed would have been a total massacre or route in my favor, but by the end of the game both of our armies were mangled and broken between stratagems and firestorm. It was tons of fun all the way around with the game ending on turn 5 with a very narrow victory for the Chaos Marines.

A few highlights from the game:

• Commissar Yarrick facing down a group of 10 Chaos Terminators in combat, being killed, and then rising again to fight his last battle with them.
• Plague Marines melting the legs out from under a landing platform.
• Khorne Berzkers flailing feebly at the walls of the bastions for turns on end.

Overall: I can easily see myself wasting plenty of hours with the rules in this book, it runs pretty smooth if you’re familiar with the base game. So if you want an alternate game set without the massive amount of time it takes to play Apocalypse then I say pick it up and the terrain is just awesome enough to get on their own. For what it’s worth the whole thing gets my seal of approval.