WIP it good: Deadzone Enforcer Captain, more problems

After doing a test run for fitment on a Deadzone Forge Father yesterday and being less that thrilled, I figured I’d better try a mini from the other starter force: the Enforcer Captain.

Up until the head, things looked pretty good: Single-piece torso, a bit of posability in the legs and arms, no separate shoulder pads limiting movement.

But the head . . .

The Enforcer heads have gigantic ball joints, and the torsos have shallow socket joints. The only way the ball mostly disappears into the socket is if the head is posed looking at the mini’s own feet. A whole squad all checking to see if their space-laces are untied is going to look bad; the alternative is shaving/filing down that joint until it fits correctly . . . on all of them.

Deadzone looks like a great skirmish game. I’ve got a full setup ready to roll — nice neoprene battle mat, Necromunda-style cardboard terrain, starter box, extra dice. But having both of the forces included in the starter turn out to be sloppy sculpts is really dampening my enthusiasm.

And when I compare these minis to the squad of 40k Tactical Marines I’m itching to build — which I can see are properly sculpted, come with instructions so I don’t accidentally mix up their bits, and should be as fun to work on as my Terminators have been — it’s hard to work up much excitement for Deadzone.

Deadzone feels like a bad investment into which I shouldn’t sink anymore time and money. If Mantic got this core element wrong, which my first impressions suggest they did, what else did they get wrong that I don’t know about yet? And why squander my renewed enthusiasm for miniatures on subpar sculpts when I could be working on amazing Blood Angels models instead?

Time to sell my Deadzone stuff and move on.