This week Games Workshop launched Warhammer+  – a service which aims to offer subscribers digital benefits including access to associated gaming apps, an online vault of content mined from previous publications, and Warhammer TV – a dedicated streaming service offering animated shows and short films set in the worlds of Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. Greg D Smith picked up his subscription on day one and had a look at what was on offer.

For those in the know, this one has been a long time coming. While the company may only have announced Warhammer+ a few months ago (and has been hyping it ever since), the flagship Angels of Death show has been in development now for many years, spearheaded by Richard Boylan, the man who produced the well-received ‘visual novel’ of Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Helsreach on YouTube. Yesterday it finally landed, with a schedule of the opening episode of Angels of Death and three episodes of the Hammer & Bolter series of animation shorts. So was it a case of quality over quantity, or did this feel like slim pickings in return for the expected subscription fee?

The truth is, it’s a little of column A and a little of Column B. It can’t be denied in the age of Netflix, Prime, Disney+ et al that launching a streaming service with just four twenty minute episodes of fiction plus some game trailers already seen elsewhere and some specific hobby content in the form of painting guides and a few ‘Battle Reports’ (filmed tabletop games) feels a little… unambitious. But the numbers don’t necessarily speak to the quality of the offering here.

Angels of Death up first and the good news is that this one is promising, though not without some reservations. The stylised visuals (which are to be expected following Helsreach) will not be to every taste – the black and white contrasted with the occasional splash of red might look artistic but it can also make everything very dark and possibly hard to see on the screen of a tablet or phone (and at the moment, the technical side of things means Smart TVs can be cast to but the service is patchy on many platforms at the moment). It also has an issue with facial animations, which never quite seem properly synched up with the dialogue. These niggles aside, the voice casting is excellent, the writing is sharp enough and while it won’t really be all that decipherable to anyone who doesn’t know a Blood Angel from a Dark Angel, to its target audience (like myself) it really does represent the sort of onscreen adaptation we’ve imagined for the past few decades.

Hammer and Bolter is a different kettle of fish altogether. With a more anime-stylised aesthetic in its animation and with each episode telling a bite-sized, twenty minute or so story from one of Games Workshop’s fictional universes, though here the opening episodes are all focused on the sci-fi-themed 40k, with no Age of Sigmar (the fantasy side of the Warhammer hobby) to be seen.

Death’s Hand follows the story of Inquisitor Kiamoro, obsessed with his foretold death and desperate to take any measure to prevent it. Of the three episodes this is the weakest – the narrative feels like a series of excuses for cool set pieces and a final payoff which is then rather overdone – but the aesthetic works well enough, the animation crisp and detailed and the voice work again very good. The story itself feels akin to one of the old ‘colour texts’ which used to infuse White Dwarf magazine – snippets which would depict some scene or other with no context – and it therefore fees a little hard to be invested in either Kiamoro or the mystery of why he must die and at whose hand.

Bound For Greatness feels as if it would sit rather nicely in Black Library’s (GW’s publishing arm) Warhammer Horror imprint, telling the story of a lowly menial in a library whose daily task is simply to count holy books which are handed out to the planet’s firebrand preachers, but who becomes increasingly convinced that something funny is going on. It’s a tight, atmospheric little bit of storytelling, in which various neat little tricks are used to convey the drudgery and oppressiveness of Adept Neath’s daily existence and the associated compulsion it eventually creates in him to defy the various rote intonations of the speakers set within the walls to not read or think and sets him on a dangerous path. Where Death’s Hand fees like the wrong type of story to be telling in this format, this feels exactly the opposite – self-contained and telling a nice little horror tale that won’t exactly surprise but does rather delight in the telling.

Old Bale Eye was the episode chosen by the company to put out as a free 24 hour preview to hype the upcoming launch of the channel last week, and tells essentially, the potted history of Commissar Yarrick and his ongoing feud with the great Ork Warlord Ghazghkull Thraka. These are two of the oldest famous characters in the 40k setting, having been established since the early nineties, and their ongoing saga as the Greatest of Enemies is well-known to any fan. That said, this re-telling of the key points, told from the point of view of an old Ork ‘Runtherd’ trying to put the fear of their violent gods up two young whippersnapper Ork boyz is an entertaining enough time. Of the three episodes of H&B this one feels like the animation is the choppiest, as if some frames are missing. Doubtless it’s a deliberate stylistic choice but it does rather jar in a couple of places. Again, being a re-counting of the main narrative beats of a backstory developed over a quarter of a century, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the perfect subject matter for this kind of self-contained mini-vignette type episode, but it’s amusing enough and watchable.

At £4.99 a month or £49.99 for a one year subscription, Warhammer+ isn’t exactly cheap, and if you’re looking purely for the televisual content then it really doesn’t represent – at this point – a decent return for the money and you’d be best advised to wait a few months and see how that catalogue develops.

For those invested in the hobby itself, the combination of exclusive models (one of which is free, the other can be bought via the sub), painting tutorials, battle reports and the digital vault encompassing fiction from old, out of print publications and old issues of the infamously heavy and difficult to store White Dwarf and short-lived Warhammer Visions magazines might swing the scales more in favour, as might the offer of a £10 voucher to spend in GW’s online store in October for those who subscribe by the 31st August and free access to the Warhammer 40k app and the upcoming AoS app (currently £4.99 a month and tbc on their own respectively). It seems that the company recognises that it can’t (at least for now) offer enough audiovisual content through the app to justify the price alone. It does seem a strange decision to not have included any of the successful Black Library audio dramas or novels in the package, especially given that some of them have involved high-profile genre luminaries like David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Billie Piper and Brian Blessed which may have helped broaden the appeal outside the traditional, still fairly niche fanbase, but perhaps these things await us down the way.

For now, between technical issues, a relative lack of content and the variable quality of that content, this is likely one for established fans only, but the signs are there that this may become something much bigger in its own time.