Inside the set are four miniatures - an all new Warcaster, Helynna Vahr, two light warjacks in the Chimera and Griffon, backed up by the Heavy Manticore warjack.
You also get everything you need to get up to speed with the new edition of Warmachine and also the faction, as along with a mini rulebook you get a little Retribution guide book, taking you through some background and also some hobby stuff. After that there is a heavy paper playing mat with positions marked out which corespond to positions in the training book, which talks you through step by step how various movements and mechanics work.
Once you get past the paper you get to the fun stuff- miniatures, stat cards, dice and generic Mk3 tokens.
The pictures that follow should be viewed while appreciating how much of a pain it is to take pictures of white plastic. It's not one of the easiest materials to get good pictures of!
First up is Helynna. She comes in 3 parts, with both arms separate to the main body. The plastic she and the 'jacks are made from is fairly rigid with limited bounce from what I can make out - PP tend not to leave things on sprues so you don't get much to play with for stress testing the plastic without breaking models.
There is some nice detailing across the model and she's in a fairly dynamic pose, but she does suffer from mold lines in hard to remove places, such as all across the folds of the material around her neck. The mold line also continues up one ear, across her head and down the other one.
Next are two bags of plastic pieces, which make up the warjacks. One bag has the heavy warjack in it, while the other has the two light 'jack pieces mixed in amongst each other. As someone new to building warjacks, (bought the Retribution all in one box when it was available but haven't assembled any of it yet), this is quite off putting, as you have a jumble of pieces without any instructions on what to use where which could really put a newer hobbyist off.
Since taking these pictures, I've actually started to build some of the models.
The main bosy of the Manticore. I've left the arms off until it's painted for ease of access and also the head so I can pose it when the arms are added.
The forearms are still to be connected to the upper arms/shoulder pads.
Not a particularly smooth join for the arm blades, they'll need filling. Some of the joins where pieces had been removed from the sprue were also a little twisted and almost frayed in places, as if they had started to be pulled off the sprue by being twisted rather than cut off.
I've also built the warcaster Helynna and have a little bit of a gripe about her pose.
Her base - instead of just using gravel, I filled the bottom of the base with some Scale75 sandy paste before sticking the gravel and tactical rock into it.
Back to my gripe about her pose. As you can see, she's stood there, all dynamic and mid cast, but she's stood off her base. With the way they've posed her, it's pretty much impossible to get one foot anywhere in the centre of the base without the other being off the edge of it, so when she gets pinned to the base, it'll be to the rim.
The models look like they'll be fun to paint and they'll probably need it sooner rather than later as the off-white plastic gathers visible dirt and scratches far easier than regular plastic seems to - even just from filing down mold lines with clean files, it just made whole sections of the models dirty - not a good look in my opinion.
Overall, the warcaster looks cool but could do with her legs being closer together, plastic is solid but white isn't a good colour for it and warjacks need thinking about when assembling rather than just assembling by numbers, which is what makes assembling Games Workshop models so easy now.
