Review: Hammer and Bolter: Undercity

In the list of often neglected races in Warhammer lore, I would not have picked the Skaven as the feature of anything, let alone an episode of Hammer and Bolter. “Undercity” was a Warhammer’s version of a gothic horror story with our protagonists venturing deep within the lair of the Skaven to find the group of missing people taken.

While that plot is rather basic, how it was done definitely wasn’t. The normal “former friends who are now at odds” is present again, but it isn’t as prevalent as it has been in shows like Interrogator. What made this oddly different, though, was that it didn’t play a role in how the story played out. “Undercity” started with Toll finding Callis in a bar, trying to recruit him for a rescue mission of the cousin of the High Arbiter.

As the story moves on, Toll hires on Callis’s former Lyssa, and it goes over about as well as you would think it would. The three of them make a great team, because they’re able to make it through the vermintide that killed their soldiers. Once they got through them, the real villains seem to have made themselves known, and it was the vampires.

I was loving the story, because it was the twist at the end that made the story. Everything up to it was pretty standard, but that ending where the Arbiter’s cousin was turned into a vampire was pretty slick. I had my bets on him being killed as the heroes walked into the vampire lair.

This was, hands down, one of the best pieces of animation that I’ve seen from Games Workshop. There was no sign of shortcuts or reuse of animations. This was the cleanest so far. I can’t stop saying enough. On top of that, the sound design for “Undercity” was amazing. The clattering of the Skaven was the defining audio queue for me. It sounded so good.

As a one shot, this was near the top of what Hammer and Bolter has to offer so far. The story did enough to keep me very interested, and the animation kept me enamored. There needs to be more exploration of the Age of Sigmar era, because there’s so much to see. There’s major lore characters to see, and wars and battles to witness. Hopefully, this is part of a wave to introduce more of the Age of Sigmar.