For a year now we’ve heard the slow tramping of void-armour shod feet faintly whenever we’ve played Heresy games. Somewhere out there, there was a nutter with a horde army entirely made of Forge World Resin. The Solar Auxilia have remained a fever-dream for many for too long – but now that marching sound has been replaced with the drawn-out whine of charging lasrifles as they arrive, finally, in plastic.
Before we dive in, let’s say thanks to Games Workshop for sending these over for review
This review is for the Rifle Section as seen in the launch box – the Rifle section kit, a box making up 20 of your basic Solar Auxilia grunts, handy for making one extremely large squad or two basic ten-soldier sections, may vary from the below. The Rifle Section kit is slightly unusual in that it’s made up of a single sprue of five bodies, which can be made into five normal Auxilia, or two rifles, one vox, one vexilla and one Sergeant. If you’re going into the Solar Auxilia, you’re going to see this sprue a lot, which is perfectly fine – it’s a very nice sprue.
We can dive right in to what’s great about this kit. It’s very posable – each torso, arm and head combination being adjustable on top of five distinct pairs of legs. There’s a lot you can do with a simple arm lift or torso twist and that’s great because your basic Solar Aux list, even as allies, probably starts off at 40 infantry in one flavour or another. I don’t think you’re going to get tired or irritated with virtually monopose models. The rifle arms pose well on any legs or body as well, and as far as a series of dry fits goes there aren’t any particularly awkward combinations to avoid. Those who have put together 30+ Mark 6 Tactical Marines will no doubt be pleased to hear this!
It’s also packed with options – the Sergeant has every option available in the list, including all pistol variants (las, plasma, needle, blast and hand flamer) and close combat. It’s a varied enough sprue that you could make everything needed even in the line command options, so an infantry tercio can come straight out of this kit, saving the Tactical Command Section for a HQ choice. There’s the odd point that the augury scanner seems to be missing, though the handy Auxilia vehicle accessory sprue will sort you out there – but everything else is right there for you.
They’re a largely pleasant build, everything matching up nicely and sitting well. The only tricky part is to take your time to centre the torso on the waist – the Solar Aux have thick belts and prominent underwear armour, so going even slightly off-centre will leave a big gap on one side or the other. All the Solar Auxilia gubbins – the weird steampunky bits that either keep the armour going or pump them full of combat drugs (I legit have no idea) are well keyed into the torso, so siting these correctly is a breeze. There’s a lot of very nicely done options – larger clips, bayonets, a massive choice of heads (variations on a theme here) and bags, grenades and pouches a plenty.
I’m not really here to talk about the Solar Auxilia design, so I think it’s probably enough to say that they seem a very close fit to the resin models – if you liked those you’ll like these. There have been some concessions to modelling in plastic but these are very minor. Tubes and hoses are more “flush” with the body, quilting has vanished off the Sergeant and the back of the armour is boxier, along with the shoulder power-plant-thing being smoothed off along the top. They appear to be slightly chunkier and squatter, scaling “better” (smaller) with the Mark VI plastics as seen below. All of these make sense when thinking about the strengths and limitations of plastic tooling, and are a fine compromise given the ease of assembly, strength and cost compared to the resin (I don’t know how much a box of 20 will retail for, but it’s got to be cheaper than 20 in resin, right?). I don’t think there are any irredeemably sad losses from the resin equivalents and this appears to be an excellent conversion to plastic.
Painting
I don’t think I’m the only one who looked a bit askance at the official paint job for these guys. The choice to do upper and lower armour panels in different colours really accentuated the already heavy waists of the models and made them look like they were wearing a particularly revealing set of metal chaps – all to the good if you’re into that look, of course. Instead I decided to go with all armour in the same colour and decided to go a little unusual with a baby blue and off-white scheme. I think it’s come out well and gives the models a slightly more cohesive look than the official paint job.
I followed the “best practice” of painting heads separately, but this is unnecessary unless you’re filling around with painting the backs of the heads different colours and painting in-situ is perfectly fine.
Overall this is a lovely kit, a joy to paint and – weird waists aside – filled with all the bits and options you could want for the Solar Auxilia. I think they’ll make good Tempestus Scions and Imperial Agents squads too, so a much more versatile kit than you might think at first glance! For me, they’ve got me all in on a Solar Aux army, and plastics have certainly made collecting the army a viable option, so I’m hoping these guys are the first of many to cross my painting table.
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