I ordered some Space Marine Terminators and 18 of the Battle for Macragge Genestealers from the Warstore for some Space Hulk action. I had a chance to open the Terminator box and put some stuff together this morning.

The box contains a rudimentary instruction booklet, a sheet of decals, 4 sprues, 5 40mm round bases, and a sprue of 4 25mm bases.

The first sprue has five different pairs of legs, a pair of sergeant shoulder pads, four pairs of basic shoulder pads, 4 basic Terminator helmets, 1 Terminator helmet with additional optics over the left eye, a teleport homer, and 5 little Crux Terminatus icons.

The second one has a 4-part Cyclone missile launcher, a matching front torso piece that has cabling running up to where the socket on front of the Cyclone launcher is, two heraldry shield plates, an Inquisitorial shoulder pad with the Inquisition marking and a raised flange with an “Imperator Deus” marking, a bare sergeant head, a nicely sculpted backbanner, three choices of backbanner finials (a Crux Terminatus, an Iron Halo, and the standard eagle-and-skull), a set of rolled scrolls, some sort of little wreath device, 5 different sets of purity seals, and some sort of hanging cloth dealie that looks like a tabard or something that drapes from a shoulder pad.

The third sprue has 5 different front torso halves, 5 rear torso halves, another set of rolled scrolls, and another one of those tabard/drapery things.

The fourth sprue has a power sword arm, 4 different power fist arms, 2 different chainfist arms, 4 different storm bolter arms with the new-style box magazines, 1 storm bolter arm with the classic double curved magazines, an assault cannon arm, the assault cannon’s ammo box, and a heavy flamer arm.

There’s a lot of stuff on those sprues, more than I was expecting. However, a lot of it isn’t really the kind of stuff to be excited about, and there aren’t enough of the things that people ordinarily *do* want. You get one of each heavy weapon, for example-I’d have preferred an approach more like that of the plastic Devastators, which includes multiples of the same weapon in the boxed set.

Okay, on to the build. The first thing that went through my head was “Holy flash, Batman!”. It took quite a bit of scraping and delicate knifework to get all the flash off of some of the parts, but I consider that a minor issue, and I’ve dealt with worse before.

The basic assembly process is to pick a set of legs, glue it to a 40mm base, build the torso from a set of front/back halves, glue that to the top of the legs, pick a pair of arms and glue them to the sides of the torso, pick a pair of shoulder pads and glue them to the arms, then pick a head and glue that into the concavity in the torso.

The finished plastic Terminators look a lot better than the older plastics that came with Space Hulk 2nd Edition, and look more “alive” than the old metals because of the more active poses. I was worried that they’d be so hulking and massive that they’d dwarf the new plastic Genestealers, but when compared side by side, both the Terminator and the Genestealer take up a pretty similar amount of real estate, and they look good together. Next to a basic tactical marine, the Terminators are much more massive and imposing, and they certainly put the “dreadnought” in “tactical dreadnought armor”.