Spoilers within:

While the first Dark Imperium book is one of my top 5 Warhammer 40k books, this one is close to the bottom 5. What made the first book cool, is not here.

In the first book we are introduced to Guilliman and his new legion of Primaris Marines. Primaris Marines are as the name says, an army of Marines designed around Primarch gene seed. They were expected to simply roll over any and all enemies of the Imperium. And they do! In the first book we see how powerful a single Primaris marine is. They are next to invulnerable to the forces of chaos. Where entire squads of normal Space Marines fall, a Primaris will win. This was awesome, Chaos was getting their butts handed to them. The storyline is moving forward and it looks like the Imperium of Man will retake the stars with ease thanks to Primaris Marines and Guilliman leading them.

In this second book, they are suddenly as weak as normal Space Marines! Half the book is spent describing "gore" of Nurgles taint over the world. There were literally pages of "the ground was squishy with rot and ooze and flies" and it got so repetitive describing this over and over and over it took you out of the story too often because it was annoying. Later on, they have a battle on a large space station that has a SQUAD of Grey Knights. Anyone that knows 40k will know a single Grey Knight can send a greater deamon back to the warp. Typhus somehow kills them all without breaking a sweat. Sorry, but no. He should have kept the Grey Knights out of the book because they should have easily won - it's what they were designed for. Typhus has no chance. There was also a large Titan fight and they ended up fighting huge wooden catapaults or something? It was so dumb.

I have no idea how this series went from so awesome to so bad. Hopefully the third book has what made the first book awesome. Unstoppable Primaris Marines just obliterating the universe as they should. ( )