Starting development shortly before the great war but not being completed until after the bombs dropped by the Enclave, the X-01 power armour is the most advance suit in existence. Few in number and prized by those who possess them, it’s a formidable weapon in the wasteland. Now the armour is available in hard plastic for the first time.
Thanks to Modiphius for providing this kit for review.
The Miniatures
Lupe: Fallout: Wasteland Warfare – Unaligned – X-01 Power Armor is a hard-plastic sprued kit that lets you build three of these intimidating suits (presumably with someone inside it as well). It’s a single slim sprue with all components on it, and it’s not dissimilar in many ways to the plastic T-45 kit also made by Modiphius. It’s a cleaner kit than that one though, with crisper detail and a nicer fit when building, and it’s good to see their standards move forward.
Each model is a distinct pose, and though there are head and weapon options they can really only be built in one specific pose, so while the trio look great if you did want more than three, you’d probably want to kitbash them a little for variety. That’s a pretty unlikely scenario though, considering the role these play, so I think it’s fine.
The weapon options are broadly very good. Each model has different options (which I understand, but the ability to give everyone a laser rifle would actually have been nice for Factions at the least), and they’re as follows:
- Laser rifle, combat shotgun, or assault rifle in one hand and the other either empty, holding a clip in reloading pose, or with a ripper
- Assaultron blade, axe, or ripper in one hand and the other either with an assaultron blade, with a 10mm pistol or empty
- A minigun or a flamer
The dual-wielding assaultron blades is undoubtedly the coolest build, but all of them look very solid. The only exception is perhaps the assault rifle, which is not to my tastes, with a distinct bulbus rounded barrel (maybe a cooling sleeve?) that looks strange to my eyes. Other people will like it as it’s familiar to those who have played Fallout 4.
The kit comes with three two-part helmets (and though I’m not usually a fan of these the join is placed very carefully to obscure it and it doesn’t make them worse measurably, just a bit fiddly) and a couple of bare head options, one masculine one feminine. It’s a good touch just for variety, though I personally think the bare heads look a little silly perched in the middle of the giant collar thing, so I went with the helmets.
There’s not much else to say here. The instructions are clear enough, the fit on the parts is good and they’re easy to build. Some mould lines to clear up, but nothing terrible or out of the ordinary. The sculpts are nice and crisp, and they feel weighty but dynamic. Considering how good the Nuka-World gang plastics are, this suggests that Modiphius are just going to be a reliable plastics manufacturer, which is a relief.
I chose to build mine with a laser rifle, a ripper and open hand, and then a minigun. That way I can use them in my Brotherhood of Steel Factions list.
Lenoon:Â I really like the construction of these models, particularly the leg and body sections. Building the sides of the body into the leg allows for sculpted detail to continue down the body to the legs, and sells the constructed, chunky and hard edged fallout power armour aesthetics. The shoulder/pauldrons wrapping around as a high collar makes for a unique and slightly inhuman silhouette that hunches the miniatures over, weirdly making them look even taller compared to earlier power armour marks.
This does limit the poses you can achieve with the kit a little, as if you’re keeping a seamless join across the pauldron you limit the angles that the Lower arms can take without cutting and chopping or greenstuff. That’s alright though as the kit is designed around this limitation and still gives a good range of poses.
T-45 compatibility: If you want to mix and match armour marks to give a scavenged feel (or to pick your bonuses, I don’t think I’ve played a Fallout game with a unified set of armour for a long time), you can stretch out the X-01 kit with the plastic T-45s. Heads are an easy swap, and many of the arms work well. It’s very difficult to get the shoulder mounted weapons from the T-45 kit to work on the X-01s, and while I tried with the fat man launcher I couldn’t quite get it to work in a way that looked good. The single weapon lower arms all work fine, and open up a wider range of weapons to equip your X-01s with.
Painting and Basing
Lupe: As these would be joining my Brotherhood on the table, I went for a pretty classic simple Brotherhood steel scheme. I did mix it up a bit, going for a darker blue tone and cleaner finish with less rusting. My thinking here was that these suits would be newer and not quite so worn and endlessly refurbished at the T-45s and 51s that the rest of my force is made up of. I applied a dark steel basecoat, then drybrushed up a couple of times progressively lightly with lighter bluer steel colours, until the top drybrush was incredibly light. Then I picked out the details and applied an all-over black enamel wash. Once dry I just went back and edge highlighted the very sharpest edges with a bright steel, and based them. The basing is to match my existing New Vegas style bases, with scrub grass and cracked dry earth.
Lenoon: I wanted to keep these fairly simple, beat up and in keeping with my Brotherhood Outcasts scheme. It’s a simple black spray/black wash/grey dry brush with roughly daubed on red markings in unique places for each Knight. Without reference pictures for Brotherhood Outcasts in X-01 armour (I figure they managed to explore a vault after the reformation of the Brotherhood pushed the last die hard Outcasts of the Capitol Wasteland and scrounged some up), I decided to the classic fallout thing and have the vast majority of armour details painted over either black or red. Heavy silver sponging gives a good (and very quick) chipped effect and liberal use of weathering powder ties it all together. This kit was fun to paint – apart from the heads, where the amount of small detail begs you to pick everything out in different colours, but that isn’t very Fallout-y to me so I settled on what I think is an unsatisfactory compromise. If the heads were a little larger it’d be easier but as it was I struggled, though they came out ok in the end.
I wanted to base these X-01s as if they’re striding through the Mojave, with enough ambiguity about it that it could be just about any fallout game. It’s weird because looking again at New Vegas there’s quite a lot of undergrowth colour variation so that you can easily pick out crafting/food resources from the decoration, so there’s darker scrub, light parched grass and occasional blades of green in there. The sand is morghast bone washed with aggaros dunes and brushed with morghast again, then three colours of static grass and some nice tufts. If I get around to it, some 3D print Nuka Cola bottles or empty psycho canisters could be added to finish it all off.
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