Hello Bunnies!
GW have kindly sent us a Fellblade for review and painting! I have been very much looking forward to getting this kit and adding it to my Salamanders!
The kit itself is huge! It comes with 5 full A4ish sized sprue and 3 smaller sprue's. So much plastic! I was surprised to see the rumoured price point as I was expecting a higher price. It will now be possible to get 1 for half the price of the resin version!
Building it was incredible straight forward. If you've built any of the new plastic heresy tanks then this will feel very familiar. It is mostly just a bigger version of a sicaran in many ways. There isn't any more parts to the tank than the non super heavies, all the parts are just all bigger!
Interestingly they have included the new laser destroyer and heavy bolter sponson sprue along side the Spartan/Land Raider lascannon arrays sprue's. This means that you can in fact have 2 sets of sponsons built for the tank. I made the laser destroyers and heavy bolters. I could in theory use my Spartan sponsons as well. Which would give me all the options. Likewise I could use the laser destroyers on the Spartan. I am liking this flexibility that the new design for the sponsons allows.
The new kit, as with the other resin to plastics that we have seen, is very faithful to the original design. Much of the upper part of the tank is identical. The biggest differences are on the lower portions. The original used the Baneblade as a base and as such the tanks and wheels all had a imperial guard feel to them. It was also a fairly old design in the first place so GW have given it a nice update to bring it inline with the currently design style for the Legion tanks. The front has also seen a face lift, which again is more in keeping with the current designs. The demolisher cannon has also been updated to be the same as the current vindicator version. Overall all of the changes are improvements to my eye!
I suspect many will be wondering why the options for the Glaive are not included. Firstly there was no more space on any of the sprue's to fit the Glaive's turret. So it would have meant adding in a 6 large sprue to the box, which would push the price, though I suspect most would be willing to pay that bit more for both options. However, more likely though GW want you to buy both versions rather than giving you 2 tanks for the price of 1!
This is a great kit and I am very pleased to see it make the transition to plastic! The massive price saving that the plastic kit brings is a huge bonus and for me it now makes it much more possible that you will not have to choose just the one version to own any more but you could in fact own all the different versions!
With this great kit and with the improvements to tanks in 3rd edition we're going to be seeing many more of these on the tabletop than we ever used to!
Happy gaming!
Andy
