Tyranid Invasion: Rising Leviathan II, A First Look

Greetings everyone, BeeCee here. Evan usually gets the honor of reviewing all the new books but this time I thought I would take a quick stab at one. Tonight part two of the invasion of of world Satys was released and we have five more dataslate formations to talk about!

Quick! We have to come up with a way to sell Tyranid warriors kits!

The dataslate starts out with the next installment of the fluff story about Hive fleet Leviathan making planetfall. I know you are just here for the formations so I will spare my thoughts on how the story is developing quite nicely and it was a great read.

ON TO THE FORMATIONS!

The first formation consists of a Tervigon and three termagant broods. The special rule is that when spawning gaunts with the Tervigon, you must reroll 1's. At first glance you may think, "Whoa cool, more gaunts!", but the devil is in the details. I'm not a probability whiz but it sure seems like rerolling 1's gives you an even greater chance to spawn out. I am not very impressed with this one.

The second formation is a Tyranid Prime and three warrior broods. The benefit of this formation is their synapse range is increased to 18". This formation would be cool if warriors were any good. Sure they are three wounds but toughness four means Mr. Riptide earns his paycheck for a day... 0/2

The third formation is called a Skyblight Swarm and this thing seems really friggin' cool. It's a winged Hive Tyrant, one Hive Crone, two Harpies, and three Gargoyle broods. The gargoyles have some really cool special rules. The first one is called Objective Secured and it allows gargoyles to control an objective even if an enemy scoring unit is within range of the objective. It's like a "Tie goes to the runner" rule for Gargoyles. Very cool! that's not all either, the gargoyles broods also have an endless swarm type rule that if a brood is entirely wiped out on a 4+ it is respawned and goes in to ongoing reserves and the new brood is considered part of the formation so if the dice get hot you will never run out of gargoyles. This seems like the core of an almost entirely flying MC list. Approved! I hope my wife lets me buy a couple harpies!

The fourth formation shows some love to the artillery. It's an Exocrine, three biovores, and a warrior brood. If the Exo and the Biovores are within 12" of the warriors they can reroll scatter dice when firing blast or barrage weapons. This is another solid formation! Ok GW, batting .500, can the fifth one push us over the edge?

Lastly, we have the Endless Swarm. Three hormagaunt broods, two termagant broods, and a warrior brood. The hormagaunts and termagants have the same endless swarm type rule that the gargoyles had in one of the previous formations, on a 4+ a wiped out brood comes back in to ongoing reserves. I think it's pretty solid, you just better hope you aren't playing purge the alien. I am going to give this one to them as well, 3/5!

Overall we are definitely seeing how GW "intends" for us to play Tyranids, a swarm of monsters overwhelming our opponents in a sea of expendable troops. There are also two more themed missions to play out the invasion using some surprise allies for the poor schlubs stuck on this planet about to be made in to ripper food.

I think there are some very nice list tailoring options here and part two of this three part series is definitely worth picking up..