Friday, 4 July 2014

Unboxing Warzone - Cybertronic Starter Set


With seven awesome factions that each has their own unique character it's difficult to decide which Mutant Chronicles Warzone Resurrection force is the one for you.

I'm therefore going to do an unboxing on each of those aforementioned factions in order to enable you to come to a (relatively) informed decision. We'll look at the stat, strategy, tactical and gear cards as well as looking at the models in both their unassembled and assembled forms. If there should be any minor assembly issues encountered along the way then we'll cover those as well...


The Cybertronic 'Starter Set' contains enough parts to make two Dr Diana's, ten Chasseurs and an Exterminateur in various configurations. All Starter Sets from the Kickstarter gave you a legal army of one Warlord and two units of five 'troops' as well as additionally giving you some kind of Support unit or Light Vehicle as well. The newly configured sets are slightly different in that they now give you two leaders of a more generic nature. Some of these still have 'Warlord' stats, others can be used for other things (should you purchase multiple Starter Sets...they are a bargain after all) or you can use the rules for creating your own Warlords and 'Heroes' that can be downloaded by clicking on the following picture.


You'll need to download it anyway for this particular starter set as some of the rules for the Exterminateur (the big robot..) are in it.

First we'll show you what you get in 'army list' form as well as the minimum and maximum potential unit values that you can make from your starter set. Obviously some units can be increased in size at a later point and their maximum value will increase accordingly and if you use the custom warlord rules that will change the points as well so for the purposes of this review we'll keep the 'Leader' models as generic as possible.

Warlord (Tech)- Commander Dr Diana (175)
No upgrade options.
Troops - Chasseurs x5 (75 Min) (166 or 196 Max)
This unit can take up to two Cybernetic Enhancements (55 points total for the most expensive two)
This unit has four upgrade options (66 points total should you take everything though you only have one spare 'Dr Diana' after you use one as a Warlord so you'll only be able to spend 66 points max on one squad and 36 points max on the other).
Troops - Chasseurs x5 (75 Min) (166 or 196 Max)
This unit can take up to two Cybernetic Enhancements (55 points total for the most expensive two)
This unit has four upgrade options (66 points total should you take everything though you only have one spare 'Dr Diana' after you use one as a Warlord so you'll only be able to spend 66 points max on one squad and 36 points max on the other).
Support - Exterminateur (135)
This unit can take up to two Cybernetic Enhancements (26 points total for the most expensive two)
This unit has one upgrade option at 15 points.

This gives us a points range of 325 points (Minimum OOC of Warlord and two troops) up to 672 for this starter set though your actual figure will most likely be somewhere in the middle. You can reduce the minimum value even further by using the 'Heroes of the Solar System' rules mentioned above to create your own Warlord.

Onto the actual bits and pieces then...

Unassembled.
We'll look at both sides of the parts 'as they come' without any clean-up in order to give you a complete picture of what you get and what work they need.

Dr Diana's.


Chasseurs.
You get two lots of parts to make ten Chasseurs in total. There's sometimes minor differences in colour with the resin but the difference is purely cosmetic and in my experience has made no difference to material quality.


Exterminateur.
This one was a bit awkward to get a decent picture of due to the shape so I've taken a couple of extra ones...that doesn't mean you get two, lol.


We also get a number of resource cards which vary in appearance from faction to faction...


...as well as stat cards for the units in the starter set and a number of 'Strategy', 'Tactical' and 'Gear' cards for use with the advanced rules. Some of these cards are only available with certain models but this is helpfully labelled on each card. Where there are multiple quantities of each card I'll just show one of each type.

Stat Cards.


There's a significant mis-print on The Exterminateurs card...that Strength 24 weapon is actually Strength 14. The pdf I mention earlier is correct though.

Tactical, Strategy and Gear cards.
There are often more than one of each card and sometimes as many as three or four but showing the same cards multiple times seemed a bit redundant.

Dr Diana.

This one is for the squad upgrade 'neoclone'  version of her.


 Chasseurs.

Exterminateur.

Starter.
Strategy.

Tactical.




Gear.

I suppose we should look at them assembled as well.

The models come with appropriate bases but unfortunately they have slots in them but this can be easily rectified. Personally I fill them with hobby store matchsticks then base over them though there's any number of other methods. I haven't based these yet.....


Dr Diana's.
The two Diana's are different though their backpack attachments are the same.





Each of the 'arms' on the backpack has a ball joint and can be put in any of the four available slots (one in each corner) so you can vary the configurations and they are interchangeable between both models if you'd like the ladies to have multiples of a particular attachment (there aren't any spare ones though so they'd both end up with multiples).


Chasseurs.
Most of the arms have both hands holding the weapon and these are generically spaced so can be placed on any of the bodies and the single arms are also generic in regard to the attachment point. The legs, body and head are already attached which makes assembly much quicker and simpler than before. These took me about a quarter of the time to assemble as the Kickstarter Set did.....

All the weapon arms all have a one and two-handed version and there are enough weapons to equip the unit with all possible upgrades or generic weapons as you see fit.



Some of you are undoubtedly interested in how the new versions differ from the Kickstarter versions...
The new versions are on the left and as you can see have far more dynamic poses than their predecessors. They look slightly shorter on some of the pictures but this is simply due to the fact that they are in running poses and are therefore leaning slightly forward.  


Exterminateur.
The gun is in two parts and are the only separate bits and though this limits the posing options a bit (without conversion, that is) it does make assembly very easy indeed.



A Group Shot.

If this article interested you then you may might want to look at some of the other articles in this series which can be found here.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.

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