Blue Horrors finished - review time!

Finally, the two entire boxes of Blue & Brimstone Horrors are finished. I haven't done large squads end-to-end in some time, and this was an excellent reminder of the ups and downs of assembly line painting. Doing this saves a lot of paint (especially when painting smaller details such as dagger blades), but boy is it a chore to do Glorious Gold on 20 Blue Horrors.

Anyway, working with these kits inspired a little rant. Here's my rating.

Miniature size: 10/10. I don't apreciate GW's miniature scale creeping ever upwards. Knight Titans are fine, but Greater Daemons don't need to be that size. (Especially if their stats are nowhere near. Want huge daemons? Make them worth it. Make them Lord of Wars. Something.) Primaris Marines are fine on 32mm bases, but why on earth would regular marines and lesser daemons need larger bases?! And why, oh why, do regular Plague Marines, who are still 1 wound models, need to be twice the size of the old kits? Given the above, I was very pleasantly surprized that Blue Horror miniatures, and especially Brimstones, are exactly that - miniatures. They're teeny-tiny daemons. Awesome. Love it.

Pink Horror and Malignant Plaguecaster for scale:

Poses & poseability: 4/10. Brimstones aren't even multipart. The two little guys on a base are a single piece of plastic. I at least expected Blue Horrors to feel like the Pink Horror kit, with interchangeable heads and arms with extra options. But no. Now, they do have a lot more dynamic poses, so I see how that requires a trade-off. And we already get 20 miniatures in a box, so there might not be room for extra parts. Still, it was very strange to cut the pieces off the sprues, then trying to randomly fit them together, only to fail and resort to the actual assembly guide, to discover that several models are effectively mono-pose. I tried to diverge from the assembly guide wherever possible, resulting in several weird poses. Oh well.

Mono-pose blue horrors:

Painting: 8/10. Brimstones were very fun to paint. They are effectively a single surface, with just some eyes and teeth for details, leaving plenty of room for gradients. Blue Horrors are more traditional, in that they have more details other than skin. In fact, they have way too many details cramped unto those tiny models, sometimes resulting in missteps and corrections.

With the saltiness of the assembly and golden jewels rapidly fading, I can honestly say that I liked this kit and give it a solid 5/7.