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I've had an urge to start mass fantasy battles again in 28mm and Mantic is one of the few players on the market. I have some of Mantic's first attempts and aside from the skeletons and zombies it didn't do much for me. Hated the Dwarves and although I didn't mind the Elves they didnt grip me. I wasn't a fan of the metal and plastic Chaos Dwarves and the Goblins werr terribly cast. After that I dropped away from following Mantic closely. So what have they produced since then that really works?

They have plastic Abyssals and Succubi coming to the market soon that are well detailed and have a decent amount of options. Their Naiads are also good, although maybe not quite the same quality, and they have some great Salamander designs, but their plastic tooling leaves something to be desired. You should look for reviews and see which designs you like the most, as Mantic designs can be hit and miss.

They also released some plastic Basilean Men at Arms, those are crap. Don't buy them.

I'm a fan of their ogres (which is a shame as I already had a GW ogre army) but their design can be polarising. The new abyssal stuff is very nice and so are the salamanders (also a shame - I have a GW lizardman army as well). I wasn't that keen on the new centaurs until I saw the studio ones painted up. Now I may have to get a few for my nature army.

If you have some of the plastic skeletons then there are nice metal conversion parts to make them into various kingdom of dust units (i.e. tomb kings) coming soon. Metal bits on plastic legs would be a toppling disaster for individually based minis but isn't a problem for multibased units.

The designs for the river guard (i.e. frog men) look interesting. Not seen anything beyond sketches yet.

I'm also a fan of the ogres. I really don't like GW's fat ogres so Mantic ogres are much more what I think an ogre should look like.

The undead range is also very nice IMHO.

People seem either to love or to hate Mantic's models. I started buying their elves waaaaay back in 2009, when that was all they had (the Kings of War rules weren't even out yet!) because I liked them so much better than the GW cone-head High Elves. I also like their dwarves. OTOH, most people seem to dislike the elves and lots of people dislike their dwarves.

Personally, I dislike their ogres, and much prefer GW's take on them. Their orcs are great, but very different from GW style. I like a lot of their Abyssals range, too, although the army itself doesn't appeal to me. Their undead seem to be the only thing that is almost universally loved.

One of Mantic's fumbles, IMO, is that they've switched between different materials a few times, which makes me hesitate before I buy stuff from them. The restic minis turned me off of Dreadball, because the material was unfamiliar to me and I don't think that they were clear enough about what the material was in the Kickstarter campaign. That stopped me from buying any Mantic stuff for a long time. Their hard plastic minis are generally very good, though, and their metals seem good too.

I dig the couple Salamander releases we've gotten so far, and if I were going to make a KoW army using actual Mantic models I might be tempted to go that route. However I'd need to see more than an infantry kit + hero before just saying fakk it and tossing in Reaper stuff for cheap bulk.

- Salvage

As an overall range, I really like the abyssals.

Very consistent design style throughout and quality sculpts.

If non-KoW models are considered, the new hard plastics for Warpath and Deadzone are the best of the bunch, really fantastic models.

I like the ogres, but they do have the whole tiny legs thing going on, so that's something to be aware of.

The undead plastics are still pretty nice, to my mind. Lots of variety in the skeletons, with a little work.

I'm a big fan of their orcs. They aren't megacephalic gorillas, so they don't really match any other companies' greenskins, but Mantic sells pretty much everything in the army list so you won't need to go to anyone else.

I started buying dwarves right before Age of Sigmar came out(perfect timing, right?), and in all the uproar I heard about Kings of War and by extension Mantic's line of models and I think I actually like their dwarves better, though they do seem to be really polarizing. On fine details, GW is better and that's probably true across the board, but as a whole I find that the GW Dwarfs look like fat little men dressed as vikings where as the Mantic ones actually look like small but stout little warriors. I just really like their style all together.