The recent Rise of the Dark Mechanicum supplement for Legions Imperialis introduced the Mechanicum, with a lot of robots, vehicles and infantry we’d previously seen at 32mm scale. It also included the Dark Mechanicum Stalkers, which are an entirely new set of units that we haven’t seen at any scale before.
Three new boxes have just gone up for pre-order: Stalker Constructs, which contains the smaller Stalkers and also the infantry Stalkers; Serperos ‘Overlord’ Heavy Stalkers and the Thanatar Siege Automata Cohort. Thanks to Games Workshop for kindly sending us some of these to review.
We’ve already covered Thanatars in our review of the Mechanicum Battle Group. They’re lovely models. I find it a little surprising that they’re the first kit to be released on its own from the main box, as I’d have expected infantry sooner, but I’m sure we’ll get everything else before too long. This review will look at the new Stalkers.
Dark Mechanicum Stalker Constructs
There are four different units represented in this kit and, as with the traditional Mechanicum units, they all have long names that are tricky to type. You get two each of the Scintillax ‘Cyclops’ Noospheric Stalker Network, the Errax ‘Butcher’ Assault Stalker Construct and the Tenebrax ‘Archer’ Battle Stalker Cohort. There are also eight bases of Harpax ‘Swarmer’ Scout Hosts. The Stalkers are all on 50mm bases and the Swarmers on 25mm.
The box includes three Adeptus Titanicus terminals for the Scintillax, Errax and Tenebrax. The Harpax don’t have rules in Titanicus.
I’m pleasantly surprised by how different the three Stalkers here are. It would have been easy to give them all the same legs and just change the central core, but then it would have been difficult to tell them apart. They all have a different leg set up, using a pair of smaller legs on the Tenebrax and Errax, which has six legs while the other two have five. The result is that the Tenebrax feels smaller and lighter than the other two, and the Scintilax is a bit taller, looking more like it’s in charge. There are four different poses for the big legs but only two for the small ones, which is plenty to achieve varied poses between your Stalkers.
There are some very tiny and fiddly pieces. The Errax has very thin mechadendrites but these all arrived intact and went together well. At times I had to use tweezers and a magnifying lens to make sure all the tiny bits went on right, but there aren’t too many bits for each Stalker and they went together fairly quickly. The legs didn’t require massive mould lines to be removed, though they did benefit from a bit of attention there, especially around trim and spikes.
Surprisingly, you don’t get Volkite Culverins for your Tenebrax so there’s no option to build those. This is odd as they easily could have given you some Volkites, by just having one less spare leg on the sprue. But given that the gun isn’t here, it’s strange to me that they gave Tenebrax this option in the book. I build mine with Exo-planar cannons as those are the only option in Titanicus, where I expect to use them. Obviously it’s very hard to see what gun you have under a Stalker anyway, so it doesn’t matter all that much.
The trim on the legs is a pain. It’s very thin and the casting loses definition lower down the leg, till it disappears completely. I found it easier to paint the whole armoured sections gold and then filled in the panels red or black, meaning I never had to paint the very thin trim on its own. You just have to make up where you think the trim is when the detail rubs out.
I’m not a big fan of the Harpax Swarmers. There’s nothing all that wrong with them but I think they could have been a bit more fun if they’d given us a few more poses, with their mechadendrites waving in different directions. That said, a detachment of them does look good together. They have a sense of motion that reminds me a bit of a shoal of fish.
Also, Harpax can have two different weapon options: Exo-planar repeaters or Harpax Lascutters. There are actually two kinds of weapons modelled on these but the instructions don’t mention it.
You probably want to group the models on each base according to the weapon you want them to have. You’ll then end up with two detachments from this box, one with each weapon option. I’m not confident which is which but at this scale all that matters is that both players know what’s what. To help with that, I painted one of the detachments red and the other black.
Dark Mechanicum Serperos ‘Overlord’ Heavy Stalkers
There are four Serperos in the box. The sprue provides you with enough bits to build them all with any weapon combination you like. I’ve chosen to make two with each gun to show what’s available. You could probably magnetise the main guns if you wanted to.
These are much larger kits than the other stalkers so they’re mostly not as fiddly. You don’t get any spare legs and there aren’t as many poses. I built the first two Serperos with symmetrical front legs and the second with non-matching. I prefer the non-matching ones as they seem more natural.
Being bigger models, the Serperos are quite a lot easier to paint. You have the fairly big armour sections on the body to work with and what feels like less trim on the legs.
Bases
I really don’t like the bases that the Stalkers come with. They have only done one base design at these sizes so you get four or six identical bases in these boxes. I don’t think it looks all that good to have all your stalkers walking over the same piece of ground. You could enhance it by adding some ruins and things like that, but it would be easier to work from a blank base in that case.
For my own Stalkers I’ve added a load of mud, puddles and broken trees, totally covering the old urban layout. That’s intended to match the bases of my Legio Mortis battlegroup for Titanicus and I think it suits the Stalkers pretty well. But I probably spent almost as much time on the bases as I did painting the models. That’s not an issue for conventional tanks, which aren’t based.
Actually after doing these I remembered that I’d rushed my Titans’ bases a bit. Maybe I’ll go back and rebase them on the thinner LI bases to match my Stalkers. I’d quite like to use these as the starting point for a full Dark Mechanicum army for LI, maybe supported by a couple of Mortis Titans and some Sons of Horus arriving by drop pod or by air.
Conclusion
Aside from the bases, these are really nice kits. They provide the Dark Mechanicum with a very different, more sinister, feel than you get with the robots and infantry used by the Loyalist side.
Stalkers have a very different feel in the two games they’re designed for. In Legions Imperialis they’re pretty big and scary but in Titanicus they’re some of the smallest models on the board. A Serperos is a monster in LI, looming over infantry and tanks, but in Titanicus it’s a nuisance. The models somehow work in both contexts though, as either War-of-the Worlds-style striding monsters or a skittering horde of spider bots.
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