So I’ve been working on building my Ogre army, and one of the core things for it is going to be warriors. These are the basic Ogre Warriors from Mantic.
These miniatures are in the 28mm scale and come with 40m bases. There are enough parts included to create 6 figures either with hand weapon and shields or with double handed weapons. Each model has a core torso/leg combo that leads to some very static poses compared to the traditional leg + torso setup that other manufacturers of miniatures tend to do. This is kind of a bummer as it makes for each model to be in a more or less upright straight forward marching pose. While they look good, it would have been nice to be able to make one or two along the edge of the unit looking another direction while still walking forward, a minor detail I suppose.
The bits that are included offer 5 unique heads for 6 models, they offer two of each head type per box of 6 models. It would have been nice to see 6 of each so each unit wouldn’t have any over lap on heads, but this is pretty close. The parts themselves are not on sprues and are pre-snipped, which is super nice as you don’t have to clip off all of the parts in advance.
Mantic has plastic and metal miniatures, but they also have some miniatures that are a Plastic and Resin combination. These are made of that material and it’s noticeable and they feel harder than regular plastic miniatures. Most of the parts in the first box had some significant mould lines that needed cleaning and they were not as forgiving to clean as a normal plastic miniatures tend to be. What was interesting is that I bought two boxes of these figures, the second box I bought did not have nearly as many mould lines to clean, maybe an odd batch? Who knows.
These guys were easy to build for sure, they needed a little extra cleaning to get the arms to fit on the single hand-weapon and shield guys, but the two handed ones needed more massaging than that. Officially, the worst thing to put together is the 3 part army/weapon combo, where you need to put both left and right arm on and weapon at the same time, which should be simple, but two together and then go from there. That’s never the case, since one arm of the other won’t quite line up with one of it’s two joints and then you’re stuck trying to get stuff to fit by shaving off a bit here and there and testing the fit over and over. This is not unique to Mantic, but they certainly haven’t moved past this when it comes to two-handed weapons.
These guys have a very different look from the traditional GW Ogre or the Warcraft style Ogre, that’s essentially a large fat, pot-bellied beast. I do like the look of those models, but it’s not something that seems to be a common trope, the ‘fantasy ogre’ if you will. These have a very brutish, muscle-bound thug look, makes me fee like I have an army of elite guys rather than a bunch of beer kegs with legs. Overall I like what I this box has to offer, but If they added 1 additional hand weapon type and 1-2 more head types, the variety would be amazing rather than adequate. I think these will work well for a solid core unit in this army.