Warhammer 40,000 animation The Butcher's Nails puts you inside a World Eaters helmet — and makes a strong case for a first-person Chaos Space Marine game

Games Workshop unveiled The Butcher's Nails during its Big Summer Preview showcase — a new Warhammer 40,000 animated short coming to Warhammer TV that spends almost its entire runtime inside the helmet of a World Eaters Berzerker named Makrath. The trailer shows Makrath tearing through loyalist Space Marines and Astra Militarum soldiers alongside Iron Warriors allies, all from a first-person perspective complete with HUD elements, a Bolter held at screen-bottom, and enemy outlines that look lifted straight from a sci-fi FPS.

Games Workshop described the episode on Warhammer Community as depicting "what he sees from inside his helmet," adding that "the action is relentless — the entire episode is almost a single non-stop fight scene." The visual language is unmistakably video game-coded: the HUD readouts, the weapon positioning, the target marking — it all reads like a playable first-person shooter that doesn't exist yet. One standout moment has Makrath executing an Imperial Fist with a point-blank Bolter shot to the face, which the article rightly clocks as very Doom.

The World Eaters are one of Warhammer 40,000's most viscerally appealing Chaos Space Marine legions — servants of Khorne, the Blood God, led by Angron, their Daemon Primarch who is essentially rage given a body. The Butcher's Nails themselves are cranial implants that drove the legion into a permanent state of berserk fury, which is both the show's title and its entire vibe. It's a setting that maps almost perfectly onto the fantasy of a fast, brutal, melee-heavy first-person game — something distinct from Space Marine 2's third-person power fantasy and from Boltgun's boomer-shooter take on the universe. A first-person Chaos Space Marine game in this mold doesn't currently exist, and The Butcher's Nails makes that gap feel more obvious than ever.

No release date for The Butcher's Nails on Warhammer TV has been announced beyond "soon." For now, the trailer is doing the rounds and quietly making a lot of Warhammer fans wish someone would greenlight the game it's clearly imitating.