Product Review

Over the weekend I received a new blister product to review from Mike Cannon of Wizard Workshop.
http://www.wizards-workshop.com/oscommerce/catalog/index.php
The blister is called "Rat Swarms" produced by Mega Miniatures. http://www.megaminis.com/

Here is a pic of the blister unopened:


As you can see it is a bright red color making it easy to spot and is packed full of miniatures. You can also see the very low price of $9.99.

So the next step is to open it up:


Here is the pic after I dumped the items onto my table. My first thought was a lot of metal and a lot of loose flash. My next step was to count what you get. I throw away the loose flash and count. 1 big sized rat and 9 smaller rats. For about $10, you get 10 metal miniatures and 1 of them is ogre sized. This was starting to look like an excellent deal.

My next step was to look at the sculpting work. How did the miniatures look?

Here is a pic of the larger rat on a 40mm base standing between a 3rd ed Rat Ogre and one of the newer 5th edition ones:


I'm not totally impressed with the Large Rat. The sculpt isn't bad, but its not remarkable either. Reminds me of some old Grenadier Orge sized Rats I purchased several years ago. A bit more muscular would have been good as well as a loin cloth. Arms tucked into the side always looks bad, IMO. He looks more like a standing mouse than a rat. Small teeth, no claws.

He does have the height of a Rat Ogre and would work in a pinch, or if you were looking for some big rats cheap. Even though the others are painted and he is not, I consider him comparable to the older 3rd edition, model.
However, while there was a lot of loose flash to trim off, the mold lines were very difficult to find, and would require minimal work, which is something GW minis often are very guilty of.

Here is a pic of the Giant Rats:


Since I got 9, I wanted to see how they would look as a swarm. 3 is as many as you could put on, without it looking totally crowded. A couple of weapons, bones, or the mini-rats every skaven player has laying around would fill out this swarm base easily. So it looks like you could build 3 swarms out of it.


Or in comparison to an average sized Giant Rat that GW produces, these rats would fit right in. GW has several Giant rats smaller than the one I'm showing here, and a few larger.

As for the miniatures themselves, again, a lot of flash and hard to find mold lines. Unlike the big rat, these rats have some excellent detail, the proportions look good and overall an excellent Giant Rat miniature.

The only drawback I really saw to these guys, is that there is only one sculpt. Every single one of the nine are the exact same pose. A little variation would have been good.

Final thoughts:
I'm not a big fan of the huge Rat, he isn't a bad model and I might use him in a pinch if I was running a lot of Rat Ogres and wanted to add in something different.

However, the cost of the blister is justified from the 9 Giant Rats you receive. Whether you want to slap together 3 swarms or bulk out some Giant Rat units, these guys are awesome. Just spread them around so the same mold look doesn't bite you, but if you are looking to bulk your G.Rat selections to 2 units of 24 G.Rats from 2 units of 18. These 9 guys can go a long way to filling up those empty slots, and can mix in well with the GW rats.

For the price, this is an excellent deal. I give it an A-.

In this day of $4-$8 miniatures for a regular rank and file guy, any company that puts out good metal miniatures at a fair price is a company to be praised and supported.

I'd like to thank Mike, for trusting me to do a fair and honest review of the product.