Codex Necrons: A Review

So along with many other people this weekend, I picked up the Necron codex with a bit of skepticism.  This is the latest codex written by the infamous Mat Ward, but don't let the authorship fool you, this book actually has a lot more depth to it than I expected.

 The Book

Pretty standard, as we've been getting for years, a standard 96 pages, soft bound, probably one of the last before the game goes to the fantasy-style hard bound books, which I can't wait for.

The Writing

I'll be honest, I don't particularly care for the fluff in this book, or any book that Mat Ward has written, that said, I don't dislike it as much as I expected to.  The stories are fairly interesting and it's nice to have a more complete timeline.  There are some parts which seem like exaggeration, or just making them appear more powerful than everything else in the universe (until the next Ward book), but I've come to expect that after reading Codex: Blood Angels and Codex: Grey Knights.

Oddly, despite my general disliking of the back story of the army, I really do enjoy a lot of the fluff around the specific units, especially the Deathmarks.  These guys really illustrate the true horror that the Necrons should be, they wait in another dimension for just the right moment to strike, then they step through into reality and shred your very synapses until you're just a quivering pile of goo.  AWESOME!  Let me talk a bit more about the army...

The Units

As you may have noticed, all my excitement around this army is focused around the awesome new units in the book, some of which are just downright horrific.  Aside from the Deathmarks, there is a host of new vehicles, characters and monsters.  The Wraiths in particular have gone through an overhaul, especially visually, instead of a weird snake with a skull and giant shoulder blades, the Wraiths (and all Canoptek units) have a look somewhere between the machines in the matrix and horrible robotic insects.

Of all the new vehicles in the book, sadly it is the unreleased that captures the most attention from me.  The Necrons have access to a dedicated transport for nearly every unit in the book that is a supersonic fighter with a nasty gun, for a mere 100 points.  It wouldn't be hard at all to make an army that is fully mounted in fast skimmers, that invades your enemy's tender spots like a creepy uncle... maybe that was a bit too far.  Aside from the transport, there is the to-be-expected heavy support version, which exchanges it's transport capacity for a Death Ray, yeah, you read that, a fraking Death Ray!  It has a short range weapon that draws a line 3D6" from the point you nominate and does a S10 AP1 hit to everything under that line.  I like to joke that it's a one-shot weapon, because there is no way any opponent will let you fire it twice.

Some of the old units, which people considered particularly under-powered, particularly Scarabs, got much more effective, and are back to being the devastating anti-tank units they used to be.

Conclusion

Overall, this book has a lot more internal support and synchronization of tactics than most other 40k books, some have even likened it to Warmachine in that regard.  Overall, I have to say that overall, I say this is a great book and worth a read.