Answering the prayers of Warhammer 40,000 fans the world over, Games Workshop has released a teaser trailer for Astartes II, the long-awaited sequel to a seminal fan animation. Despite being less than ninety seconds long, it’s packed with action and lore that gives tantalizing hints at what the full video will contain when it drops in 2026.
Games Workshop dropped the teaser trailer on Wednesday without any fanfare: you can watch it below, and you should, because it’s probably the most intense Warhammer 40k animation since the original Astartes.
According to the Warhammer Community post that accompanied the trailer, this isn’t actually footage from Astartes II, it’s “a compilation of shots that represent the former lives of the characters that will appear in the show”.
As the video shows warriors from five different Space Marine chapters, and ends with a shot of a Terminator helmet emblazoned with the icon of the Inquisition, we can infer that Astartes II will star a Deathwatch Kill Team.
The Deathwatch is an elite group of Space Marines drawn from multiple chapters, tasked with hunting the most dangerous alien threats to the Imperium of Man (though they will throw down against other Warhammer 40k factions, like the servants of the Chaos gods, if they’re in the way). They employ specialist wargear, and leverage the unique talents of their different members to achieve feats no one chapter could manage alone.
Five Space Marine chapters are present in the video. The Retributors, whose icon is a hand clasping a skull, are an original creation of Syama Pedersen, the animator responsible for the original Astartes. The trailer shows them assaulting a Chaos Space Marine cult on a hive world, and later suffering a defeat to the Death Guard.
The yellow and black armored Scythes of the Emperor, whose icon is a pair of crossed scythes, are depicted fighting their natural enemies, the Tyranids, the voracious alien species that devoured their home world Sotha. The marines in the video are firstborn rather than Primaris marines, most of whom died out in the final defense of Sotha, so this could be a scene from that valiant last stand.
The warrior in black and white armor with a white skull logo painted onto his shoulder pad and helmet is a Mortificator (or Mortifactor, they’ve been called both things). Recruited from a death world, the Mortificators are extremely morbid, and favor close-ranged violence. The video shows a warrior punching Orks, pummelling a Winged Tyranid Prime in the face, and ramming a chainsword into a fallen human.
The warrior with a jump pack, red armor, and a winged blood drop icon is a member of the Blood Angels. This section is really brief: we see the Blood Angels take part in an aerial jump assault, and an Imperial Navy battleship (not a Space Marine vessel) being struck with either weapons fire or boarding pods while in a planetary atmosphere.
Lastly, the warriors in green with white helmets, with an icon of a black skull inside a spiked halo, are the Sons of Medusa. They’re descendants of the Iron Hands with a particularly devoted to the Cult Mechanicus – no surprises that they’re shown piloting tanks. They’re depicted fighting T’au stealth suits in a city, trading fire with T’au energy weapons from tank back, and chewing through hordes of Tyranids on the open plains.
It’s wild how much action is packed into just ninety seconds, and how well each segment captures the essence of Warhammer 40k. But it isn’t surprising: the original Astartes deserves its status as a cult classic. Pedersen clearly understand cinematography, sound design, and what makes the Warhammer 40k universe tick, to a degree few people can match.
Games Workshop announced it had hired Pedersen to make Astartes II all the way back in March 2021. After years without news, some people had given up hope that it would ever emerge. But now that we know what’s coming, it looks like it may have been worth the wait.
There’s a slight irony in the Deathwatch being the stars of the new show, as it looks like they won’t have their own Warhammer 40k Codex army book for this edition of Warhammer 40k, and almost lost support as an army altogether. That hasn’t hurt their popularity: in fact a player fielding the Deathwatch won a massive 1,100 player tournament just a month after they received updated army rules. We imagine Astartes II will make them even more popular.
Source: Wargamer
