So if you’ve seen my posts here’s over the years, I’ve been collecting the Abyssal Dwarf line from Mantic for quite some time. I have not been impressed previously with the metal casting quality and the hybrid kits that Mantic has used from time to time. I have also run into a few instances were major details on metal pieces were ruined by large flash / miscasts. Thankfully, they have improved their processes enough to produce some pretty decent figures.
Some of the things I like about these kits will cover all 3 blisters and some will be about specific models, I’ll try to highlight each one as I go. I started this review a while back, but never got around to finishing it, so in the case of these miniatures I finished painting two of these models and not sure if I’ll paint later.
The dragon fire team was a pretty easy metal kit to clean up in terms of flash and very easy to put together. The flash locations were in places that easily filed off and made for a clean looking miniature.
The one downside to this miniature is that given the 50mm base, it’s super crowded, and later on proved a challenge to paint. I ended up removing the secondary angry dwarf from the base to paint, which made it a lot easier to manage. Overall this miniature turned out well and I’ll have pictures of my painted one up in the future with all of my finished Abyssal Dwarves.
Arhak Soulbinder was a pretty neat miniature on the surface and I was happy to see some oddball type stuff entering into Mantic’s range of miniatures. Odd heroes, weird monsters to offset rank and file units is something that I have always liked when playing tabletop wargames. Now, at the time I picked up this figure, Kings of War v1 was out, since then, Mantic ran another kickstarter and released Kings of War v2.
Sadly Arhak did not make it to Kings of War v2 from what I can tell, but hopefully he’ll end up in an expansion somewhere in the future. Either way, a robot spider with a flame-thrower is a pretty interesting miniature in my book. The legs on this mini took some coaxing, but the flash / mold lines were in pretty easy spots to clean up.
I ended up trying a few poses with the legs and opted for some of them being up in the air like pictured on the blister. I was hoping to make him look like he was lunging forward, but couldn’t make it work without having to pull out a pile of green stuff to accomplish this.
The last blister was Ba’su’su the Vile, a character who made it from Kings of War v1 to Kings of War v2 and a model who looks very unassuming considering how strong of a character he is.
The flashing on this miniature was attached to some small details, which was not the case on the first two miniatures in this review. This made it a bit trickier to clean up the bottom of his wings. Aside from that the miniature cleaned up fairly well.
Another thing about this miniature was a set of thin veins on the wings, a neat detail. But even with the thinnest amounts of paint, some of those veins were filled in by the primer and paint. In the end, this miniature turned out alright, but I kinda wish it was larger and on a larger base.
All in all, the metal sculpts and casting quality has improved from Mantic. Of course, it would be nice to get a plastic miniature with some options and bits on the sprue, but that’s not the case here. As far as metal miniatures go, the quality is no on par with some of the larger manufacturers out there, but it makes me wonder why they didn’t option for resin for their solo miniatures. Also, given that some of the other miniatures from Mantic are Resin/plastic combinations, which have varying quality issues, it would seem they were primed for moving to resin and plastic miniatures respectively.