I recently got a regiment of 20 plastic Mantic Dwarves and thought I would post a bit of a review of them.
When they were first released I had been a bit dismissive of them as I thought the detail was a bit poor and they were too cartoony. Looking at the actual figures I must admit my first view was well out as the miniatures themselves are rather decent. Possibly it was the studio paint scheme but they really don't show them to their best.
For plastic figures they are surprisingly mould line free and only minimal cleaning was required as the sprue has been cunningly wrought to conceal the lines in areas which are not visible. In fact one could just about get away without even doing any but for the purist in me I removed what little there was. Its worth noting that the plastic sprues are really sturdy, possibly a bit more so than GW kits and I ended up having to use pliers to get the main bodies off after chopping into my finger with my hobby knife!
The figures themselves are sharply detailed but stylised a bit which makes them very different from the GW Dwarves and actually have legs! Some care needs to be taken in putting them together on their bases as I got half way through constructing them before realising they wouldn't rank up!
Hopefully I will be able to get them painted up soon so folks can see them but for the princely sum of £10 from ebay, you really cant go wrong! I will be using them both for Kings of War and 3rd edition Fantasy Battle and the only conversion work I have done was to bush out the champions beard a bit and make a new standard out of wire as the one in the box is a little on the small side for my likings!
Overall I would recommend them to anyone wanting to collect an affordable army and look forward to painting them up!
All the best!
I think the shields spoil them. I replaced them with Celtic ones for the Dwarf Kings Hold games and they look MUCH better.
ReplyDeleteThe skeletons are awesomely good and MUCH better than the painted examples.