Dan Abnett has shown himself to be one of the better writers of action oriented SF, be it in comic book or novel form. But Titan: God Machine allows him so little room for development that he struggles to inject anything that might be described as a more than one dimensional. What we're presented with is centred around destruction; giant war machines that look like Transformers on steroids, traversing worlds and blowing the hell out of anything they encounter. It's the Murkan nightmare, twenty centuries ahead, and just as ugly. The impact of the artwork suffers from being reduced in size, more so in the first half, as the transition to greyscale helps with the definition of scenes. An extended belch of almost non-stop action includes a campaign on Vivaporius, a world where a swarm of Alien-like creatures called the Tyranid dominate. Here, the story briefly flickers into life when the Tyranid capture and possess another Warlord Titan. Unfortunately, just as this sequence is showing promise, it is abruptly cut short with another example of uber violence.

What I found particularly irritating is that every so often there's a ghost-like glimpse of a real story, trying to get out. But all threads which in a better title and with more imaginative editing might've been developed into interesting sub-plots, inevitably fall under the glorification of wanton destruction. All that remains, is a soulless emotionally truncated tale, that will appeal only to those who think that war is fun and might is right. Anyone else, I suspect, who has previously enjoyed the complexity and quality of Abnett's work, will recognise this as being the author on auto-pilot.