Yesterday I went out and bought the new 40k boxed game... now that I have a Real Job I can afford such extravagances. Kind of.
It has the distinction of being one of the few, possibly the only now that I think about it, GW boxed games where I have actually wanted both sets of figures... I've always liked Dark Angels, even back in the days when it was apparently okay for GW staff to be bigoted twats who would tell anyone who collected DA that they're gay because the name of the chapter was inspired by a poem about a man's struggle to hide his homosexuality (this is actually true, but the actual homosexuality has nothing to do with it... it's all about hiding a dark secret from a higher authority). Ah, I've waited a long time to get that one off my chest. Anyway on with the contents.
First a look at the books and sprues and stuff 'artistically' arranged in the box.
The box comes loaded with four big sprues crammed with miniatures, a miniature full colour rulebook, a glossy 'How to Play', two quick reference sheets, a glossy character sheet for Interrogator-Chaplain Seraphicus, some templates, two range rulers, and a bunch of dice.
The Chaplain himself is a pretty cool model, and is presented in much the same way as the recent Warhammer character releases. Like those, however, it is a very specifically posed model and isn't really compatible (except maybe the head) with any other kit so even though it's plastic the convertability is pretty limited.
I have other closeups of other sprues on my Flickr, but I cannot be arsed with putting them up here, so I won't. :P
Overall I'm very impressed with the level of detail on what are some pretty basic models. I especially like the Chaos Marines (which I'll be painting up as Alpha Legion) which seem to have found an excellent middle ground between the old Chaos Renegades and the more recent plastic Chaos Marines. There is also an obvious influence taken from
Adrian Smith's excellent Chaos Marine artwork.
The only let down in my opinion is the amount of duplicated models, this isn't such a big deal with the Dark Angels which are supposed to be kind of uniform but for the Chaos Marines and Cultists (especially the cultists) it is really quite jarring... I am doing my best with head and weapon swaps, and adding accessories, to make each model as unique as possible but I, for one, would have been happier with having the books be less shiny if it had meant getting a greater variety of models.
I am currently sticking the models together (by which I mean I am hunting for my spare hobby knife as I broke the other one... and I don't mean the blade, but the actual handle), and there'll be a followup post when I've finished that.
