Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Review: Mantic Zombies and Revennants

Some of you may remember last year I started up a Vampire Counts army using some of the Mantic skeletons and Revennant Cavlry in place of the standard Games Workshop Models. Well in the mail today I recieved the latest additions to this army which is now doubling as a Vampire Counts army in games of Warhammer Fantasy and as Undead in Mantic's Kings of War. Two games that I am 100% Loving at the moment!

So what did I get? 3 Regiment boxes of Revennants.



That's a total of 60 Revenennants!

And 2 boxes of the Zombies Regiment, which should give me around 60 Zombies.


To start off with, let's have a look at what we get out of the Zombie kits.

Here's the Mantic Zombie sprue. There are 10 of these in each Regiment set, each sprue has 3 torsos, 3 legs, 6 different heads, a couple of arms and 2 very neat components that actually allow you to split one Zombie into 2 Zombies.


What's this splitting Zombies talk all about? Simply put, the set contains a piece that replaces a torso with an exposed spine and a heap of gruesome internal organs sagging off the legs. Then with the leftover Torso, you can make a 4th Zombie from one of these sprues by mounting him on another component that makes him appear to be bursting forth from the ground.

Do this with every sprue in a set and instead of 30 Zombies, you'll actually end up with 40 zombies, some of which will look a touch more gruesome then the others!

I managed to put these 20 together in under half an hour though they still have some flash around their fingers and heads that need to be cleaned up.


I'm quite happy with them, they'll be relatively easy to paint yet have some fantastic grisly details like exposed muscles, sinew and brains slopping out that can make them really stand out. I prefer them to GW's Zombies as I found them much easier to assemble and I find them to be much more appropriately scaled. They don't have ridiculously huge hands or heads like their GW counterparts. I also really like some of the heads, some are pretty realistic saggy and rotted looking wheras my personal favourite looks more akin to something from the Evil Dead movies. Very Cool.

There isn't as much variety in these figures as what you can get in other Mantic figures but who really cares about how individual a Zombie looks? Not this guy. And if I want to, a few bits here and there could really personalise them. Good thing I've got plenty of such pieces from the Mantic Ghouls set! Actually some of that could go together very well...

Anyway, Mantic Zombies = Very Cool.

On to the Revennants.

Now the Revennants are Mantic's Equivelant to units like Grave Guard. They're your bigger, tougher much more well equipped sort of "Undead Elite"

Here's a look at the Sprue.

You get Two sets of these sprues per Regiment, each makes 10 Revennants. One sprue (not this one) in the set also has a number of optionbs to make a command group. Now I have to put it out there, Iwasn't sure about these. I really, really like Games Workshop's Grave Guard and I found the pictures of Mantic's Revennants really underwhelming and quite unconvincing.

Yet when I decided to expand the army, the excellent price for the Revennants ($45 AUD got me 60, 60 Grave Guard from Games Workshop would have been $270, no thanks) and considering I'd already got the Mantic Skellies convinced me. At least this way they'd appear to fit in with the army. Opening the box and I was blown away. Absolutely gobsmacked by the sheer amount of detail in their armour, their weapons and well my imagination was well and truly in over drive.

I can't recommend these highly enough. I assembled ten in about the same time frame as the Zombies and there was very little to clean up in the way of mold lines and flash. The legs in the Revennant set are the same as the Skellies but the torsos are very different yet fit just as easily. Some of the Torsos are the same as the Skellies but you get a heap of variant chest and shoulder plates you can put over these and no one would know. The end results speak for themselves.


Personally, I couldn't be happier, they've really surprised me with how good they actually are. I'd highly recommend these to any Vampire Counts player or Kings of War: Undead player. For the $ you pay and the quality of what you're getting, they're a steal.

I'm going to have to really push myself to paint these to the best of my ability to really showcase just how great these models are. I'd rate this kit easily 10/10

I have painted more of my last Mantic Order, I'll have to try to get somne pics up of them tomorrow. Next on my shopping list for the army is some wraiths, a revennant king and perhaps some catapults... or a varghulf... or both...

And on a completely unrelated note, I just wanted to share this, the Mt Gambier (where I live in Australia) RSL has just recieved a generous donation from the Australian Defence Force in the form of a Decommissioned Leopard Tank (one of the many phased out by us finally getting some of the American Abrams) and I managed to get my picture taken by it.


We're so used to playing around with our little model tanks in war gaming and yet there's no comparing to the real thing. To actually stand in the presence of such an enormous and powerful vehicle... It's quite awe inspiring.
In terms of scale, it's pretty Damn big too.

Anyway, thanks for reading!
Till next time!
- Beau

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