40K Review – Visions of Heresy
Visions of Heresy is a great book. Time for a quick review.
Dr Love42 here with a review of the newest Visions of Heresy art book.
The Heresy is continuing to be THE hot thing down in deepest Nottingham. Between Black Library continuing the excellent Horus Heresy series and FW churning out gorgeous marine kits weekly (at the cost of every other army in the game unfortunately) a fan of the 30th Millenium will not be short of material for a long time. The newest entrant is a re release of Visions of Heresy, the art book of that most eventful part of our favorite fictional future past….don’t think about that last bit too hard.
So what is Visions of Heresy? For those of you who don’t know GW released a series of 4 smaller art books in the early 2000’s detailing the story of the Heresy in full detail for the first time and including many hundreds of beautiful piece of artwork. This Visions of Heresy is the second time all 4 books have been collected into one book and features new art in addition to all the original.
So what do you get for your money? You get 409 pages with hundreds of high quality pictures. It also runs through the story line of the Heresy and the background of the Imperium for those who don’t know it. Its no where near as detailed as what we’ve had in the Heresy book series from BL or FW, but its still the same great story we know.
As for the artwork – Straight off the bat you get that front page. Wow. Such a stunning piece of artwork. Adrian Smiths original art of Horus atop the stairs and the Emperor climbing over Sanguinius’ broken form is one of the most iconic of 40K artwork. Choosing to update the final battle artwork was ambitious. But Neil Roberts artwork is perfect. From the looks in the faces of the two great champions, to the Custodians advancing on them, to the raging battle above Terra out the window in the background it is just perfect, and is probably one of my favourite pieces from the book. Unfortunately not all the artwork is of such high calibre. When you collect all the artwork for many a year you do have some…old artwork, that while “iconic” isn’t up to the same standards.
Downsides of the book? There’s a lot of great FW art from the Heresy books that could have been great in here. The shot in Istavan with hundreds upon hundreds of drop pod trails streaking down…that would have been incredible. As it is the only FW artwork in here is an image of each of the Legions armour. The fluff seems to be slightly older and out of date compared to some of what BL are putting out now. It’d be nice to see some of the words updated.
If you’re a fan of the Heresy series, read the books or are building a Heresy army I highly recommend picking up a copy.
Its been years since I read a previous version of VoH, so its hard for me to say with any guarantee how much of the artwork is new. But certain pieces of definitely new, but for 2 dozen new pictures, nearly all of them covers from various BL Heresy books if you already own this book its probably not for you.
