Review: Warhammer 40K – Angels of Death “The Silent City”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While the Space Marines search for their captain and face off against strange creatures on the planet’s surface, the Sword of Baal experiences a fleet wide infiltration by an unknown enemy.

OUR TAKE

You know what this show reminds me of? MS IGLOO, a Mobile Suit Gundam spin-off. Like Angels of Death, it was also a CGI war-focused series of shorts centering on a less than heroic faction that required at least some extensive knowledge of the source material to fully engage with. Though at least with Gundam, there are multiple universes you can just jump into without doing any research, whereas this show makes me feel like there’s some test I haven’t studied for and I’m going to flunk the class. But even so, the second episode of this series does continue on from its established plot of following the Blood Angels hopeful rescue of their captain while the ship crew deal some sudden major occurrences. And as a Gundam fan, I do tend to enjoy me some space navy combat tactics. So, I actually find myself pretty engaged with the stuff happening on the ship, if only because it’s paced in a way that seemingly tiny and insignificant moments all seem to be piling up into major unforeseen attacks that will no doubt be interesting to see this team work themselves out of. Even without really knowing a whole lot about this world or these characters, this does seem to have a lot of intrigue built into it.

Meanwhile, on the ground, the actual marines continue to be the main source of color in the show, and that color is red. Red because of blood. Blood that they drink. Because they are vampires, apparently. In speaking with friends who do know Warhammer 40K lore, even they were surprised at this avant-garde approach to the style of the show, though so far it doesn’t seem to keep me from being able to tell most characters apart or understand what’s happening, so that’s a plus. A Warhammer+! The showdown with the weird mutant people didn’t feel all that thrilling, however, and I imagine this was mainly just a way of establishing the fighting prowess of this particular band of marines, meaning that future encounters will hopefully be more tactical or character focused instead of just running through and turning the enemy into red paste. Red paste we will be able to tell is red because, again, they are vampires. Apparently. In the week between these episodes, I had a chance to look at the other available Warhammer+ animated show, Hammer and Bolter, and I actually found I liked that a lot more, with each episode being a singular focus and also more colors than just red. Still, Angels of Death isn’t all that bad, it’s just quite a lot to swallow so far. But at least it’s not a lot of blood to swallow, because that would not be good for us. We are not vampires.