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Since the 40K players had the tables pretty well wrapped up (and there wasn't a spare Fantasy opponent), I spend Thursday evening at the FLGS helping a friend assemble them, and I thought the experience was worth sharing.

First off, if you are looking to make both Hexwraiths and Black Knights, get yourself some old skeletal horses and a bit of green stuff. With the extra horses, you will have enough parts to make both out of one box. Aside from the mounts, the Hexwraiths and Black Knights share NO parts at all.

Flash on the sprues is negligible, with mild to moderate mould lines on the parts - but since this is a brand new kit, I find that rather disturbing. Moulds this new should not have that much slop in them to leave this much of a mould line this quickly.

The mounts are pretty straightforward. Two body halves with barding, two head halves, and a decent peg-join between the two. The heads are a trifle delicate; be careful trimming them out. Actually, that goes for most of the pieces in this kit. They are superbly detailed, but rather fragile.

The Black Knights look pretty straightforward as well. The legs are attached to the caparison for the mount, cast in two halves, and this is the only oddity from any other plastic Knight kit. This way the Black Knight horses will look significantly different from their Hexwraith compatriots - or you can use another mount, with or without barding, simply by gluing the caparison to it. Torso and arms attach fairly normally with moulded pegs. The skeletal necks can be a bit of an issue, as the contact surface is pretty small, but it can be handled with a bit of care.

And on to the Hexwraiths. <sigh> Theses sure are pretty models, highly detailed and nicely posed. Unfortunately, these are among the worst things to assemble that I have ever had the misfortune to work with. Legs go together in the usual way, torsos fit onto the legs well, the rider locks onto the mount with a pin quite nicely, and the scythe blades attach to the hafts straightforward enough. You'll want to assemble ALL the riders before gluing any of them to mounts; one of the riders will be close to bashing skulls with his horse if you put the wrong two together.

BUT...there is very little in the way of individualizing poses. You will need to follow the directions on these guys because the arms attach ONE way, and ONE way only, to a given torso. There is no mix-and-matching arms to torsos here. And there are NO - count 'em, NO - pins, pegs, or guides of any type. You're feeling your way through this one, guessing and hoping it will hold. On several models scythe handles get glued to the haft with about a square millimeter of contact surface. And on one model, that's the larger contact surface, the other is the joint between a skeletal wrist and hand.

You're also going to want to use plastic glue for this. If you use super glue, you're gonna glue the parts to yourself rather than each other.

In short, Ugh. Getting those scythes on was a royal pain, and needlessly complicated. It would NOT have been that hard to sculpt the arms onto the scythe hafts and solve a LOT of problems.

With a bit of work, heads can be interchanged... somewhat. Some of the heads just WILL NOT fit on some of the torsos. Making this worse, the directions TELL you to put a head onto a torso that it flat-out does not fit onto. I know, I tried. A lot. Even the Hexwraith photo on the box does not have that head on that torso, so someone at GW knew the directions were wrong, and yet...

In the final analysis, the kit is a surprisingly good value, IF you have spare undead horses laying around for the Black Knights so you can get 10 models for the price of 5. On the other hand, the sheer awfulness of assembling the Hexwraiths makes me wonder if it really was that good a deal after all... I cannot say it enough. Assembling Hexwaiths is a royal pain in the backside. I am also not happy about the lack of customization on the Hexwraiths; I really hope this isn't the beginning of a new trend from GW.

A very interesting review, thanks for posting it.

I've got to say the difficulties don't come as a surprise to me. It sounds like pretty much what you expect from detailed, dynamic models, especially skeleton undead. The Space Marine models are a good counter example. Easy to assemble, very posable and interchangeable, but very static and boring in comparison.

Sounds like a neat kit.

Vulcan wrote: I am also not happy about the lack of customization on the Hexwraiths; I really hope this isn't the beginning of a new trend from GW.

This has actually been a trend for nearly a year new. All the new single plastic figures relased for Fantasy have been like this. Maybe not a paint to assemble, but certainly don't lend themselves to customization.