Introduction

I ordered 2 boxes of plastic Space Marine Scouts, along with a giant pile of Tyranid Rippers, hive nodes, and infestation markers from the Warstore a few days ago. Service, as usual, was superb, and they arrived today.

I got the scouts, Rippers, and infestation markers because Advanced Space Crusade is another one of those games that I was feeling a bit nostalgic about recently. That game came with 15 of the old-fashioned mohawked plastic scouts with poofy slashy sleeves and 6 of the old-school plastic Tyranid Warriors.

I have the Warriors on order, and I was planning to use the infestation markers as spawn points for individually based Rippers because they look a lot like alien egg clusters. Throw in the 30 Genestealers from my Battle for Macragge and Space Hulk collections, and I’ve got a nice 3-tiered peon-goon-miniboss setup for the enemies. Anyway, that’s what I bought them for. On to the review!

Box Contents

The Scout boxed set contains 2 parts sprues, 2 4-base sprues, a sheet of decals, and a really rudimentary instruction booklet. The first sprue contains 5 sets of legs, 5 torsos, a heavy bolter with the right arm attached to it, a left arm for the heavy bolter, a bipod for the heavy bolter, a shoulder pad for the heavy bolter left arm, a heavy bolter ammo bag, six heads, and an assortment of extra pouches and grenades.

Six heads probably sounds like a funny number for a 5-man boxed set, but one of them is the sergeant’s head (it’s got a different headset and a Shouty Command Face expression), the other is for the heavy bolter guy (this one’s got a headset/eyepiece that looks like the smartgunner headset with eyepiece in Aliens), one’s got the Geordi LaForge visor dealie, and the other three are normal scout heads. The unpainted heavy bolter guy’s face bears an eerie resemblance to Tahmoh Penikett, incidentally.

The extra gear pieces go in 2 different body locations-there are 5 pouch/grenade bits that glue to the right chest, and there are 5 pouch/grenade bits that glue to the left rear waist. Two of those waist pouch bits have coiled rope on them.

The second sprue is the weapon/arm sprue. There are 5 right arms with bolt pistols, one of them being the sergeant’s special with Honking Big Scope and the other four being regular scout bolt pistols with scopes. There are 4 left arms with swords and a left arm with a chainsword for the sergeant.

There are 4 right arms with attached shotguns and 4 right arms with attached boltguns-both the boltgun and shotgun arms share the same left arms. The matched left-right arm pairs are letter-coded on the sprue, so be careful to keep them organized if you desprue them all at once.

There’s also a scabbarded sword, which presumably belongs to the heavy bolter scout when fielded as part of a boltpistol/sword armed squad. (This is how the metal 3rd Edition heavy bolter scout was sculpted, if I recall correctly.)

Build Notes

The instruction booklet was a bit lame, so it took me a minute or so to understand exactly how the arms are attached. There are 2 wedge shaped bits on the torsos-each arm has a matching concavity, and this forms a male-female connection that fixes the arms into their proper place.

The heavy bolter scout was a little annoying to assemble because the arms are actually posed holding the heavy bolter pointing upwards a bit, NOT pointing parallel to the ground like it shows on the box, so I thought I was doing something wrong for a while there. I ended up having to bend the torso a little bit forward and fill in the gap at the back to get the firing pose that I wanted.

The bolter-armed scouts were a little bit of a pain to assemble because the arms don’t really want to work together without some coaxing, and the junk on their belts gets in the way a little bit. You sort of have to tweak things around a little to get the arms to fit together neatly, and the main problem is aligning the left forearm with the left wrist on the weapon.

Conclusion

Once they’re assembled, though, they look better than I expected. Whoever painted the scouts on the box did a terrible job with the faces, making them look like some kind of albino Frankenstein’s monster clones with flabby chins. The unpainted models don’t look anywhere nearly as dire as the ones on the box cover, so that’s a relief.

Overall, I like these models. I’ve always been partial to scouts, and the 3rd Edition metal scouts were my favorite Space Marine models. They just sort of have this fun underdog charm compared to their power-armored brethren, I guess.