Hi, it's time for a new wargame miniatures review! This time I will take a closer look at the Wargames Factory Orc Warband boxed set. Since they were released I always wanted some of these for Lord of The Rings skirmish games as they are based upon the marvellous drawings of Angus Mcbride! These Orcs will serve the lord of Mordor as either elite Cirith Ungol Orcs or Morannon Orcs! Enough talking up to the review.
General information
Wargames Factory was one of the first wargame manufacturers outside the model kits such as Airfix and the plastic kits by Games Workshop which introduced the marvels of plastic wargame miniatures to the wargame community. Their ranges are now filled with all sorts of different kits ranging from the amazing Shock troopers to fierce Amazon Warriors! All these kits are in general interchangable and are a real heaven for miniature converters. Each of these kits also includes sufficient leftovers to fill your bitsboxes!
The box
The box and its artwork is really disappointing if I would see that box on the shelves at the local wargame store I would not bother to take a look as it looks really cheap and badly done. I would have prefered some Angus Mcbride artwork as it really shows the sort of look you can achieve with the content of the 28mm hard plastic boxed kit.
The actual boxed set includes enough components to make 30 orcs! The bad news however is that the boxed set exists out of ten identical sprues. This limits the needed variety that every Orc warband needs. This problem however is a bit solved as each body can be used at both sides to represent either back or front. But make sure that most of them are posed slightly hunching forwards as this really add character.
Each of these small sprue contains lots of weapons ranging from bows to all sorts of swords and pole arms (which can be changed easily with a bit of cutting). The sprues also contains 6 different heads of which three are really superb showing their origin from the Angus Mcbride drawing above.
Assembly
The assembly of these miniatures is quite straight forward as every things fits good. The only minor issue I have is the choice to have open hands, due to this choice some of the hands look really "toyish". But as with every problem there's a solution! Due to this problem I've started to use another type of glue which seems to melt and fill the gapes between the weapons and hands. This really adds to the look of the miniatures. Once assembled your miniatures look really good if you off course have respected the rules of anatomy.
These kits also benefit a lot if you have a large bitsbox as these miniatures could look even better with some extra weapons, arms and shields. During the assembly of my orcs I have used shields, weapons and arms from the following manufacturers: Fireforge Games, Wargames Factory, Games Workshop and probably also Perry Miniatures! Due to the use of these spare bits the miniatures now look like a real band of savage orc mercenaries in service of the Dark Lord. Please pay attention to this blog as the pictures of the assembled and converted orcs will soon find their way to this blog.
Scale comparison
The miniatures are larger than the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Orcs but can be easily used as the larger breeds of orc such as the savage Cirith Ungol Orcs or the elite Morannon Orcs. This size difference is not such a big deal as orcs are not known to be uniform in appearance as men would be. Therefore I think there isn't a big problem if you want these miniatures to represent an Orc warband in the Lord of The Rings Skirmish ruleset.
Conclusion
These miniatures are really worth their money in terms of amount and the shed load of spare bits! I can see these miniatures converted towards post apoc mutants and raiders in no time as they are plastic and really easy to convert with other products of different manufacturers. The price of these miniatures is $19.95 a real bargain! Gather your own horde now at Wargames Factory or Wayland Games, Part Two of the review with more pictures can be found here.
Dozens of other reviews can be easily found here and make sure to follow this blog as more reviews, tutorials and wargame news appears every day!
No comments:
Post a Comment