Review: Terminator Genisys Heavy Weapon Endoskeletons

Remember how there was a Terminator film last year? The reason why this film is remembered all the way to this day is because River Horse (Alessio Cavatore's game design company), with Warlord's backing, made a miniatures game based on that license. Human resistance fighters fighting it out with machines.

The figures in the starter box are all plastic, additional minis are metals. I recently got a blister of Heavy Weapon Endoskeletons to paint and in this article I will tell you a bit about the figures and what I think of them.

Here's the blister as you get it from your friendly local gaming store:

Nicely done, an appealing blister and you can look at the models inside.

The Contents

Two torsos (or torsi, if you insist), arms are separate, guns are sculpted to the right arm on each.

As you can see there is quite an amount of flash on these, but mold lines aren't bad. The way these are cast reminds me of later GW metal figures. The casting is rather nice indeed.

The bases delivered along with these figures are new to me. Flat, 25mm diameter, elevated trims – and surprisingly much to clean about them. I wonder if those are made by some other manufacturer in China rather than by Renedra. I recently read about Renedra's manufacturing plants are just not capable to keep up with Warlord's demands and they're outsourcing some stuff to China.

Building the figures

The figures are very slim. This clearly is going in the 'properly proportioned 28mm' direction. That's commendable, and many people will like that, but this also comes with a downside. Aside from a certain degree of 'creep', there's a reason why many 28mm figures look the way they do. What looks perfectly nice in a render may not necessarily translate to a metal figure that well (and I see this done in a bunch of new digital sculpts for smaller games these days).

In this specific case the ankles, especially on the dude with the backpack holding the gun in one hand, are very, very weak. Along with the nice-quality metal which is rather bendy this guy will bend out of shape very easily.

Maybe I just didn't 'get' it, but on the other guy, who holds his big gun with both hands, the left arm just didn't fit at all. The advantage of the bendy metal and the extremely thin limbs and joints is that I was able to bend it to fit rather easily.

Basing and Painting

The customer prefers for figures to be mounted on taller resin bases with a magnet put into the base for easier transportation, so I used some of my own cast resin bases with some additional stuff on top rather than the ones delivered with the models. But first...

Something very curious happened during painting those chaps. Something I had dreaded may happen: Over night the figure with the weak ankles bent over under the (not too great) weight of its own gun and torso. This is bad. You can only take my word for it, that I didn't in any way handle the mini that may have damaged it to lead to this. I also couldn't see any external signs of a miscast or bad material (even though it probably would take further insights to spot that). I really think that this is just a problem of the design itself. Either way, both ankles had snapped.

There's 5 parts in the Endoskeleton figure. That's one. 

So yeah, that's not very good. These are pretty much impossible to pin, so I went for gluing it back together (with these crazy tiny surfaces to glue together) and adding some green stuff for external strength. One might describe it as a sort of non-living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

Otherwise the minis paint up nicely. Not very complicated paintjob either. Of course it's one of those deceiving ones, as it's basically just one colour (which isn't really a colour to begin with), but they paint up nicely, as long as you're careful.

Verdict

These are well done scul- well, I guess designs. They look cool, they are very nicely detailled, they look the part. They are a bit tricky to put together and that thing about the mini collapsing under its own weight is something I rarely saw to date. I'm not sure I ever have seen something like this happen.

The fact that the minis are a bit hard to work with and VERY fragile will put off new players I think. I have read comments by people who were put off Infinity after realizing that the models were made of metal and weren't dead easy to put together. You can be about several minds on this, but one thing is for sure – people who think like that will be put off getting any additional blisters for the Terminator game as well. At least the Endoskeletons.



I'm no expert. I never designed a miniature on a computer, and maybe I'm completely wrong, but as I said, I think that the possibilities of computer designed figures often go in a direction which just doesn't work very well on actual miniatures. Delicate details isn't everything. In the end these things have to work as playing pieces.

This is a really tricky one for me, because I could be completely wrong and maybe just got a bad figure, but I really don't think so. Even IF it was damaged prior to me opening the blister, I think that this problem is one which can very, very easily happen. Please let me know if you own these minis and you had similar problems or of course no problems what so ever. I'd really like to know.

Here's coloured renders of these chaps. 

The way I experienced these figures is that they're alright, apart from these (I think) design problems. The price point is okay for sci-fi figures with a (still, I assume) expensive license slapped on: GBP 10.00. This isn't entirely cheap, but for some odd reason sci-fi/fantasy minis have their own pricing policies.

Those won't mix with your 40k figures, or other 28mm figures really. Maybe with Infinity figures,  but even compared to those they're kind of slim. They are very tall though: 32mm foot to eye. Here's a size comparison with an Infinity figure, a GW Space Marines Terminator (I couldn't resist), a Wargames Factory Apocalypse Survivor (now sold by Warlord Games) and a Warlord Games plastic Commando Sergeant. The latter two are propped up a little so the bases are roughly the same  height.

I don't know how representative these Endoskeletons are of the rest of the range. I don't know if I got a 'bad  figure' (as I wrote above: I don't think so.). Either way, it does not make me want to buy into this range. I like Terminator 1 and 2 as much as the next guy, but these figures just don't do it for me. Even if the one figure hadn't collapsed under its own weight, these are rather fragile and many gamers will probably prefer going with Copplestone's Terminator Robots (maybe with a headswap) or the EM-4 Robots if you can find some of them. Or of course use some Necrons (just to adress the elephant in the room), give them some less insane looking guns and a headswap and you're good to go.

I hope that you enjoyed this review, found it interesting, enjoyed the painting and so on. If you have any questions, comments or indeed commission inquiries, feel free to let me know via the comments section, the Battle Brush Studios Facebook page or via e-mail.