[This got a little long, so I'm breaking it into two parts. This first part will discuss my decision to buy the game, and my thoughts on the quality of the miniatures included in the starter box. Tomorrow (hopefully!), I'll post my initial impression of the rules.]
You want how much for that?
The first thing that bears mentioning is the fact that, as far as I can recall, this is the only time I've ever bought into a game largely because of its price point.
I keep fairly regular tabs on the hobby, so this one was on my radar screen for quite a while before its release. I knew a good bit about most of the salient details -- i.e., the innovative way that the figures' positions on the movement tray define a unit's abilities, the semi-collectible purchasing model, the mix of pre-painted and unpainted figures -- and to be perfectly honest, this game seemed like a very unlikely candidate for a first-week-of-release purchase. Not that I was put off by it; it's just that nothing about it screamed "must have." Rather, it fit quite squarely into my "sounds neat, let's see how it turns out" category.
But, a few weeks or so ago, I read about the price/contents of the starter box. This thing includes 120 figures (40 for each of the game's initial factions) and their corresponding unit cards and movement trays, and retails for $35. Three starter armies for the same price as a box of 10 space marines? Each starter faction for about the same prorated cost as one Flames of War tank? 120 miniatures for $10 more than a Monsterpocalypse starter (six minis total)? Yes please.
I concluded that I couldn't pass it up at that price. A starter pretty much has to be worth $35, right? So, off to my FLGS I scuttled.
So, what do we have here? More little dudes.
Of course, if the game sucks, if the miniatures suck, it could have been free and I still would have been burned, right? So let's take a look at what we've got.
There are two things that immediately leapt out at me about the miniatures. The first is visual and related to a figure's most obvious attribute: its size. The minis are billed as "25 mm" in scale, and that seems about right. I have measured a basic Roman legionnaire as standing about 26 mm tall (counting neither the thickness of the base nor the point on top of the helmet). Thus, they tower appropriately over my 15 mm FoW soldiers, but are in turn pretty much dwarfed by human-sized figures from lines like Warmachine, AT-43, or D&D minis. [So, I have to say, if you were thinking of picking up an army pack of these guys to use as cheap soldiers for your D&D campaign: probably not going to work that well.]
It is not, however, the figures' height that one is initially struck by, but rather their overall bulk (or lack thereof, I guess). These things are not sculpted to the "heroic" proportions that most miniatures gamers are accustomed to. Put one of these guys next to, say, a Warhammer human figure, and the AL guy is going to look positively waif-like in comparison, even after allowing for the difference in scale.
I don't mean that as a complaint, I hasten to add. In fact, I quite like the proportions of the AL figures. I'm certainly no anatomy/art expert, but these guys have to be more realistically proportioned than most other fantasy miniatures. Overall, I find the "stage presence" of a group of legionnaires on a unit base to be entirely acceptable -- even pleasing.
The second thing I immediately noticed about the figures concerns the plastic used in casting them. They are not made out of the same kind of hard plastic that, say, Games Workshop uses for its miniatures. It's much softer stuff, reminiscent of the material Fantasy Flight uses in games like Runebound or War of the Ring, or that Wizards uses for the pre-painted D&D minis. If those comparisons don't ring a bell for you, think about the plastic used for toy army men, and you'll at least be in the ballpark.
The use of the softer plastic carries a couple of obvious consequences. First, because the stuff is pliable rather than rigid and brittle, you're inevitably going to run into the "bendy spears" issue. Anyone who's ever seen a mini made out of this type of plastic is going to know what I'm talking about. The good news is that the packaging of the product (e.g., sprue layout and the use of protective plastic "shells" around some of the more delicate pieces) seems to have minimized the issue. It's surprising, really, given the delicacy of some of the sculpts, that the issue isn't a lot worse. My copy of War of the Ring had a much bigger problem. But the bad news is that, hey, it's still soft plastic, some of the weapons are still bent, and it's still going to take some time and attention to fix.
The second issue arising out of the use of a soft plastic is one that will probably be a larger concern to many "serious" hobbyists. The stuff simply doesn't seem to hold anywhere near the same sharpness of detail one would expect in, say, a GW mini (to invoke the hobby's 500-lb. gorilla once again). I don't ever recall seeing a soft plastic mini that looked nearly as good as a high-end hard plastic figure ... and these are no exceptions. The castings certainly have visible, identifiable details. One can clearly discern, for example, folds in cloth, segments in armor, and the fact that the undead torsos are skeletal. All of these details are relatively quite shallow, however. Bottom line: the figures aren't blobs of plastic, but they certainly aren't going to take your breath away either.
One aside that I guess I should mention at this point, since it is closely related to the prominence of the details on the minis, is the fact that I think it would be a nightmare for me to try to give these guys full-fledged conventional paint jobs. I've mentioned before that I'm a mediocre painter at best (seriously, on my best day a mediocre result is pure win). I need sharp details to have any hope of not ending up with a muddled mess. These guys just don't have them. Add to that the relatively small size and (especially) the relatively slight proportions -- seriously, their faces are just tiny -- and there's simply no way I'm even going to attempt it. I'm considering going with a "spray 'n' dip" process, but "bare plastic" is also totally in play as an option. We'll see.
Back to the figures themselves. Upon first seeing the sprues, one is immediately struck by the fact that these guys are only mostly unpainted. Two of the three factions (Romans and Egyptians) include "painted" shields. I use the quotation marks there because I don't know what the actual process entails; the publisher refers to it as "deco printing." In any event, the shields, which are separate pieces but on the same sprues as the figures, are colored appropriately for their factions, and have contrasting insignia. (For example, the Romans have red shields with gold emblems.) The designs are very sharp; they are clearly not hand painted. I like these a lot. They're probably the coolest feature of the starter minis -- which makes it pretty rough if you were planning on focusing on the third faction, the Han. They get no color at all in their starter figures.
Most of the figures are cast as single pieces (including their bases), or single pieces with shields. Some -- the Han especially -- have separate weapon arms. None are at all difficult to assemble. Most of the poses are pretty static, but there are some "action shots."
One final note on the quality of the figures: the castings are very clean. None of my sprues had any flash worth mentioning. The mold lines (aka the bane of my existence) are very minor. So, a big thumbs up on that score.
But...I thought some of these guys were pre-painted?
Yes. Yes they are. And I wanted to break that out into a separate section.
As I understand it, the game's marketing/packaging model works like this: the "common" figures are unpainted (or "deco printed," whatever), and are available for purchase in "non-blind" packaging (e.g., as "army packs" or the starter box itself). In other words, when you buy commons, you know exactly what you are getting. Earlier, though, I referred to the game as being "semi-collectible." It's with the booster packs where that kicks in.
The boosters, containing "uncommon" and "rare" figures, are packaged in a "semi-blind" format. When you buy a booster, you do know what faction you are buying, but you do not know exactly what figures it will contain.
Now is not the time or place for a lengthy discussion of the merits of the collectible game model in general. I know it engenders remarkably strong opinions among some gamers. I myself have a few strong feelings about it as well. But, however you feel about collectibility, it seems pretty much inarguable that this kind of "semi-blind" packaging is far more palatable than the fully blind model that most other collectible games feature. And while I may not love it, at least it's not enough to put me off the game entirely, at least at this point. And that's all I'll say about that right at the moment.
Anyway, back to my main topic, which is still the quality of the game's miniatures.
I've mentioned repeatedly that the starter box comes with 120 minis. That's not exactly right. It has 120 unpainted commons. It also includes three pre-painted minis (one for each faction) as sort of a sampler for what you get in the boosters.
I'm not going to try to soft pedal this: they aren't very good. I don't mean that as in "compared to Golden Daemon," or "compared to an experienced hobbyist," I mean it as in "I probably would have preferred bare plastic here." They aren't hideous I guess -- the colors are at least applied neatly -- but I do honestly feel that the publisher would have been better off to have simply cast these guys in a different color of plastic or something and omitted the paint job entirely.
But, paint them they did. The paint jobs consist of a base coat (five or six colors per mini) blocked on -- reasonably neatly, as I said above -- with no shading or highlighting. Aside from dots for the eyes (and really, you couldn't do much more there), eyebrows on one figure, and a shield emblem on another, there is no detailing. The color choices are reasonable, except for the Egyptian figure which, in my opinion, looks pretty bad all the way around.
I don't think I can recall seeing any pre-painted minis that unequivocally look worse than these three guys. They are no better, to my eyes, than the weakest of the D&D minis I've seen. They are not in the same ballpark as AT-43 stuff, to compare them to a higher end pre-painted line.
To be fair, it must be added that these are also the smallest pre-paints I've seen. An AT-43 trooper is gigantic compared to one of these guys. And, I described before how difficult I thought they'd be to paint. Finally, given the price point that I belabored so much earlier, there's no reasonable way they could have afforded to chunk a ton of production time into these paint jobs. Considering all of that, I really don't see how these could have turned out much better (a wash seems like it could have been feasible and would have helped some).
As an aside, I note that I don't see a single word on the official website touting the quality of the paint jobs. Maybe it's there and I'm just overlooking it, but I just went and checked after reviewing that preceding paragraph, and I can't find a single word. Good bit on game play, pictures of all the units ... not a word puffing the paint quality. Is that an acknowledgment that it's not a selling point? Why even do it then?
Anyway, I think this is kind of a problem. These are supposed to be the special guys, and they look worse than the unpainted rank and file. I don't know what to say to that beyond "yikes." I don't care how good the game turns out to be, if this is an accurate example of what to expect from the booster packs, I really don't know how I can justify buying many of them. So I'm a little concerned about that. I'm hoping that the actual booster pack figures will look a little better, since they will be produced in smaller quantities (one assumes).
As I've said repeatedly, these are my first impressions. Maybe after I've seen them at tabletop distances, my opinion will mellow.
That's all I have for now on miniature quality. Tune in tomorrow for my thoughts on the rules.
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