Deadzone: Doin' The Zombie Shuffle!

My zombies are here, my zombies are here!!!

Yep, my first Mantic minis have arrived and not only have I assembled half of them, I even got some of them painted too!  Sure it's not all twenty but hey, it's a start at least.

Not a fancy paint job but hey, they're just zombies...

My overall impression of these is they are pretty good minis, especially for the price.  $30 retail for a box of twenty figures is almost unheard of nowadays.  But what about the quality?  Not too shabby if I do say so!

The sculpts are pretty clean with just some minor mold lines which is good because I hate cleaning those up.  I don't mind assembling minis and find it kind of relaxing but cleaning them up?  Just not a fan.  Think somewhere in the back of my brain I'm just wait to accidentally slice off some cool little bit of detail.  And speaking of detail, these minis have a good amount of it that is nice and clean which I find always makes painting them easier.

There are also a number of options when it comes to assembly as well.  The good old ball and socket joint is the most common connection, giving you a good range of options for positioning and swapping bits around.  Note that I did say that they are the most common.  There are two sculpts that are more limited in their positioning and one of them is just downright fiddly.

Introducing jaw dropper and batter up!

On the left we have the jaw dropper.  I think he is eating a big ball of intestines but he also might be ripping his lower lip off.  Maybe both?  Assembly on this one is much clearer than the other pose as the forearms holding the spaghetti ball just plug right into the torso, quick and easy.  This is also "handy" because if gives you an extra set of arms which is good in case you don't want to use batter up, which you can see on the right.

Where jaw dropper is easy to assemble, batter up is kind of fiddly.  The rifle and both arms come as three separate pieces.  One of the arms has a flat connection at the wrist but its the other one that is tricky.  Instead of a flat, there is what looks like a tab that is actually a hook so its definitely best to dry fit this side first to make sure you get a solid connection.  Personally I find the easiest thing to do is glue the hook side to the rifle first.  Once that is set, then I attach that unit to the other arm and the body.

Overall I'm really happy with this set and I've decided to grab one of the starters as well.  I had been eyeing the Enforcers but someone else beat me to it so I decided to grab the Rebs first.  This faction has a mix of human and alien troops so I'm excited to get my hands on them.  They do look like their poses are a bit more static at least in variety but there is enough variation to keep it interesting IMO.  Once they get here, I need to start piecing together some terrain so I can actually push them around in a little plague zombie smackdown.  Until next time...