Today I have a review of Wargames Factory's box of Skeleton Warriors. I've already reviewed their two boxes of Shock Troops, and have been pretty happy with them. I actually picked up the Skeletons even before them, but hadn't assembled them yet as I haven't been working on my Vampire Counts much.
This box had a lot going for it. First off, 30 models for $19.95 is an amazing deal, and most online stores sell them at a discount. You need to field Skeletons in large numbers, so this savings is really important. Second, the models are appropriately thin (the skeletons actually look like the would fit inside of GW's human models) and I thought they would pair well with my original GW Skeletons.
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| The one on the left. |
Sadly, these models suffer from extremely poor design. As previously mentioned, the legs and arms are quite thin. However, the plastic is very brittle. This isn't a problem with the Shock Troops as they're pretty robust models, but it makes the Skeletons almost impossible to even get off the sprue. Even carefully cutting the pieces off the sprue with a brand new scalpel blade, more than half of the legs were broken. The sprue attachments are also in horrible places, such as at the joining point for the legs and torso or the neck and skull. This means you have to carefully shave out these recessed areas, which is quite time consuming.
In addition, the legs are not attached to the ankles. There is a very small surface area to attach them, and it becomes increasingly difficult if the legs are broken (which is pretty much unavoidable). The final straw came when I finally got to attaching the arms. The torsos have no points of attachment for the arms, so you just have to glue the arms against the side of the rib cage. They don't fit well and the glue takes forever to dry because of the lack of attachment points. It's extremely difficult to get the arms into anything resembling a natural pose.
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| This is as far as I got after about 2 hours of assembly. |
Frankly, I don't recommend that anyone buy these with the intention of assembling them and using them as Skeleton Warriors. I have never given up on assembling a model before, and I have assembled the metal versions of both the Lord of Change and the Bloodthirster. Neither of those is as infuriating as a single Skeleton from this kit. Even if you finish the models, they're so fragile that I expect that they would fall apart during normal transport and game play. While the kit is cheap, it is almost useless.
That said, I'll be using them for terrain decoration. Glued to terrain and bases, the fragile nature of the kits isn't a problem. I go through a lot of skulls for my Executioners models, so this kit will be helpful there. If you just need bone bits for other modeling projects, this kit is worthwhile. If you actually want to assemble Skeleton Warrior models, buy from Games Workshop or Mantic. This kit just isn't worth it.