We would like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with review copies of the Forgeworld figures launching with Battle for Edoras.
The Sprues
These figures are all Forgeworld resin casts, supplied on sprues and cast in the more modern Forgeworld resin.
All the figures were clean casts, and the improved Forgeworld resin of the last few years gives good levels of detail while being reasonably easy to work with. This piecing of the figures is done well, meaning assembly is not too complex.
Building
As with all resin figures I washed these in warm water with detergent before assembly.
There are a number of small resin gates on the figures that, if you don’t look closely at them, look like they are part of the figure. I would recommend checking the figure against the pictures on the GW website. For example on Freca, there is a resin gate on his skirt below his gut belt buckle, and it is fairly small but when you zoom in with the camera clearly not part of the detail.
Helm has a small resin gate on his left thumb that is easy to miss, and the vertical lines on Thornes tunic are detail, not mould lines as you immediately assume given how straight they are.
Thorne’s sword has both a resin gate on the end and will likely need straightening with some hot water when you get it, but be careful of removing too much resin when taking off the gate. I removed a fraction of a millimeter too much with the hobby knife, and when you stare at the model from 3 inches away, or zoom in close with a camera, you can tell.
The Figures
Here they are built and ready to paint.
The figures are well sculpted, look like the characters in the cartoon while being a bit less anime and a bit easier to grim dark them up, and scale nicely alongside the new plastic figures. I’d recommend them, especially Freca and Thorne if you are collecting a Dunlending force as you need the extra named heroes.
Conclusion
The figures are nicely sculpted, well pieced, and assemble easily. Hunting down the gates is a little annoying but GW have provided pictures of the finished figures to guide you in working out what is detail and what needs chopping off.
The only complaint I really have about this is GW’s decision to do these models in resin.
Hand casting resin figures is time consuming and expensive in terms of staff time, and if you are going to sell more than 1000 of them and have the economies of scale and internal plastics team GW have, you are likely better off doing them in plastic.
This set could have been a half frame sprue like the King of the Dead and Heralds, or combined with Hera foot and mounted for a full frame plastic sprue. I feel if they’d done that and priced them at £30-35, then the would have sold a lot of units as it would be the obvious additional purchase with the new boxed set and have a bunch of prominent characters from the film.
Locking these characters into being Forgeworld products also means they won’t be distributed through the GW supply chain to both independents and their own stores, and resin is not a child-friendly material, essentially making the product clearly not for those under 15 (as stated on the packaging) vs GW plastics (recommended for 12+, definitely not for the under 3s). If someone goes into a GW store and wants to buy Hera, the viewpoint character in the movie and narrator, then GW have put blocks in the way to do that when the other licensees have her front and centre with an action figure.
Either GW don’t have the plastics capacity as their production lines churn out Space Marines 24/7, or the GW sales forecast team lacked confidence in the product launch. I don’t know how many copies of Battle for Edoras GW have made (with four new plastic tools) but I don’t see how making these figures and the forthcoming Hera Bride of Death figure resin when they are reasonably important characters in the film is a good idea unless GW think they won’t sell that many.
I think GW will still sell thousands of these, and not making them plastic and available through the normal store and independent channels will cost them sales they could have had by making them in plastic.
And yeah, I think exactly the same about Helm in armour and the snow troll, as both of these have got MacFarlane action figures, and GW had the opportunity to have a plastic snow troll with options (and write an army list that let you take more than one, and thus buy more than one). People love trolls, as even glancing at the Great British Hobbit League Facebook will tell you, and if you let people buy a big pile of them, then you’ll be fending off Troll Pile lists at every event you go to.
GW may have very good data on the customer profile for Middle Earth collectors, and were burnt badly with the amount of resources they sunk into the Hobbit plastics, but I feel they’ve been too timid with this release.
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