The new edition of the Horus Heresy is here, and there’s no better time to dive into playing the terrible battles of this dark age. With a full rules revamp, a new starter set and a plethora of army books all dropping at launch, we’re diving in to give you our first impressions of the new edition, hitting the highlights of what’s new, what’s interesting and what’s worth playing in third edition Heresy.
Before we get started, thanks to Games Workshop for sending these over for review.
Much like the rules writing of Horus Heresy third edition, it’s only fair that it’s launch box is dense. Much like the Age of Darkness box, the box contains some new staple kits such as the Mark II plastics alongside the eponymous Dreadnought and Terminator kits. We suspect many of these boxes will be getting split amongst friends for the things they are after.
If you are picking this up to start up a new army, check out our Expanding your Saturnine Box articles for Loyalists and Traitors. Read on to see how the team’s thoughts on the models contained within.
Accessories
In addition to the models, two additional sprues are included in the Saturnine box. The first are some status markers to keep track of how bad a day your units are having – this is going to happen a lot and is a huge mechanic in this edition, check out our rules coverage to get up to speed.
In addition to the hefty rulebook are two copies of a cheat sheet which you will likely be referring to often to keep track of the many phases and tables to get your head around.
Finally, there is one crime which cannot go unmentioned, the box contains no red whippy sticks. Instead, an actual functional measuring device is included. It clips together, while anyone is going to use a tape measure, I found this quite handy for marking off deployment zones.
Saturnine Dreadnought
Soggy: I have a type, and it would appear that Games Workshop has my number. I love this thicc boi.
While it’s a shame that the sprues only contain the two arm weapon options pictured, the kit has magnet holes in place to allow you to swap them over when the later ones become available. I imagine or hope that the sprues will be available separately as well as bundled, similar to how the Leviathan and Contemptor plastic kits were managed.
If you choose to magnetise at the elbow as the upper arm you get some real flexibility in posing, which is pretty neat and I’m a fan of. As you’ll see from my photo above, I haven’t magnetised at the shoulder: The friction fit on this joint is tight and supports the arms well once primed.
Saturnine Dreadnought magnet sizes:
- 5x1mm for main guns
- 3x1mm for torso guns
If I had to compare the build experience to another, it reminded me more of a Redemptor Dreadnought than the Levitathan or Thanatar kits – which is to say it felt easier. Unlike the Thanatar it had no exposed seams front and centre and was more flexible to pose – yes, I went for the boring Captain Morgan pose, which at least is a tiny bit more interesting than the dead on default pose.
When it came time for painting and looking at subassemblies, the shoulder pads are very easy to do separately as well as all the magantised arms and weapons. The head is able to be inserted afterwards – no needing to trim the chin to fit in the hole afterwards like the Contemptor kit.
On a side note, given how overpacked this box is with sprues, some parts had become dislodged and in one case the petals from the plasma was completely missing. Thankfully this was something I could duplicate from another with greenstuff and blue stuff – noone would have been the wiser if I hadn’t said anything.
I’m not exactly sure I would field a second one of these often, but I could see myself painting up another one when the inevitable separate kit with other weapon options drops.
Saturnine Terminators
Lenoon: The Saturnine Terminators are definitely the marmite of the box – you either love these guys or you hate them; I don’t think there’s going to be much of a middle ground. They are certainly a weird looking unit with stumpy arms and legs and comically huge pauldrons. Personally I love how they look, with one important caveat I’ll get into later.
These are of the quality you’d expect at this point from Heresy plastics. Detail is excellent, construction is lengthy, but straightforward. There are occasional sprue gates in annoying places – the particle shredder and pauldron spine-things particularly irritating – but it is otherwise a matter of simply following instructions.
There’s a lot of parts here, and the build is more similar to the Leviathan or the Contemptor than to other infantry. You’re making a large hollow box, as you would a vehicle, and building onto that. They are definitely min-dreadnoughts in size too, not far off the height of the old metal boxnaught, towering over even the characters in the Heresy 2.0 launch box. I’ve based mine on giant hero rocks to accentuate this because I think it’s funny, but they are *huge* even without the rock!
You can absolutely magnetise weaponry so you can swap between Plasma, Disintegrators and fists. Without magnets, there’s every possibility that you could friction fit these – especially as they will stay in place without paint already. If you do want to use magnets, I’d recommend drilling into both the gun and elbow after constructing each component, and then slotting a small magnet into each – they’ll need to be recessed into the socket to maintain a good fit. This wasn’t difficult by any means, but was a little fiddly to get the joint sitting right.
Here’s that caveat though. From the front, these look good, clearly Space Marine tech without being clearly Mars tech which is a great bit of design. From the side, though? They look absolutely ludicrous, and not at all in a fun way. The proportions are straight up comical in a bad way.
Meltabombed: Prior to this release, Saturnine terminators were definitely not my favorite (that spot is still pretty solidly held by the classic Indomitus pattern…), but I have to say that these have definitely grown on me. From the dumpy egg look of the oversized pauldrons to the stubby “Mega Man or Samus Aran” style plasma bombards, these guys definitely swing to the “charm” side of over-wrought Heresy shenanigans for me. These guys also lend themselves very well to the vintage look I go for with my Blood Angels, as you can see.
I agree with Lenoon that some of the parts are a bit awkward to fit into place, but once you do it once you should be good to go (namely the little venty looking things on the inside of the upper edge of the pauldrons; when you get your hands on them you’ll see what I mean.) I strongly suggest dry fitting things, at least the first time through.
Both arms and legs are pretty posable in the sense that they are all ball-in-socket joints, but you are somewhat limited in what will actually look good with these chunky idiots. The inside of the knee has a little tab with three separate indents to represent a straight knee, a forward striding knee, or a more pronounced stride/crouch. Seriously, blue-tac or somehow dry fit these before you glue them. Even a little dab of super glue that you can later snap if you need to will help a LOT. I recommend dry-fitting the hip joint, knee, and ankle together to get the pose you want, then starting to glue them starting with the knee, then the hip, then lastly the ankle as the ball joint in the foot has the most flexibility in terms of how it can be posed. I build my dreadnought legs in a similar way for what it’s worth, and these felt very similar. Definitely be careful about the glue/model “sagging” while it dries; I had to save my guy from leaning over too far at one point when I wasn’t watching carefully.
These guys are so beefy looking on their 50mm bases and I love them. Even standing next to my older infantry and jump pack models on bits of shaved cork and milliput, the Terminators still tower over them. I think these guys will be a common sight on the table both because of their imposing silhouette and because of what they can DO, but I leave that to my colleagues to cover in more depth. Solid B+ kit from me, only spared the “A+ because of the somewhat finicky posing on the legs that can easily “lean” too much if left to dry in a weird position and the unintuitive fits of some of the parts like the shoulder pads.
Soggy: Due to a load of IRL stuff going on I don’t have shiny finished models to share here for these, but what I will say is that the gun arms work perfectly fine with a friction fit. I’ve got with the lazy approach like that for now, and will use bluetac for the powerfists when I want them.
Saturnine Praetor
Jelly: I’d echo much of what Lenoon said about the basic lads. This single model is nearly the size of a casteferrum and came with 64 compulsory parts and a lot of options: four helmets, loyalist and traitor options for tabard, tabard buckles, neck chains, shoulderpads, shoulder tabards and an optional cloak. There’s an argument that there’s a traitor and loyalist option for each of these, but the cloak does have a big eagle on it, so if your “good guy” wants a cloak and isn’t a son of Fulgrim, you might have to get funky with knives and sanding sticks. You get to choose from hammer or axe, with one fitting in each hand. You can absolutely build both (which is probably the best option rules wise) but he would look seriously daft.
This has the hallmarks of a modern GW kit in that clearly a (complex) are ways you’re meant to build it with some appropriate customisation. The legs have pegs that could be removed to fully repose the legs (and do away with the tactical rock), but I kept mine standard as he was going to be a Death Guard man and the stoic pose fitted. I like tactical rocks, okay? Note, if you mess with the pose on the fist arm, your plasma blaster cable will need massaging. Also, make sure you put the huge shoulder pads on BEFORE you start messing with the ball and socket joints for the arms in case you accidentally create an impossible pose (where his arms move above his shoulders).
Another pain point is that the torso floats above the leg joints with very small contact points and no convenient plugs, pegs or joints to strengthen the bond. I smothered mine with sprue goo and he still decided I was going to paint him in subassemblies a couple of times.
For my model, I knew I wanted a scythe and a bare head, and sourced these from the Deathshroud and Primaris Hellblaster kits respectively. This man is an obvious Traitor, so I added some BEEEESSSS from 40k Typhus, a bit of smoke from the Freeguild Command Corps, and made his blaster shoot GUCK with a bit from the Orghott Demonspew box.
While painting it, I was unsure how to handle the shoulder nodules. I wasn’t sure if they were meant to be glowing shield projectors, metallic components or armour coloured panels. In the end, I went with glowing shield projectors! Between the smoke, junk, pipes and shield generators this model has a lot of glowing green on him, which makes sense as an eye-catching praetor.
I really can’t state how much of an upgrade this guy is over the two Age of Darkness Praetors. You got more options in terms of pose, weapon options and customisation, but you pay for it with component bloat.
Jack: This model has way too many parts. Even for a character, 64 parts is incredibly excessive, and makes building the model tedious. While some parts have pretty good alignment pins, others don’t at all (like the two pieces that make up each bicep, or connecting the pelvis to the torso) and others have alignment pins that fit into multiple slots on the model, and it’s unclear which to use (the small shoulder pads actually on the arms). Be careful when assembling whichever arm you put the gun on – it has a cable to connect it to the torso, but the shoulder joint doesn’t have an alignment pin, so you’ll need to do that entire assembly all at once, not split across multiple steps like the instructions tell you to.
I painted this with the right arm, right leg, tabard, head, and the little ring of armor that goes around the head all separated. In hindsight, I would’ve also kept the left arm and leg off, and probably the shoulder pads as well – everything covers up other parts, making it a huge pain to paint.
Appearance wise I’m split on this. The hammer is very cool, and from the front it looks OK. The problem is that as soon as you see the side at all it looks dumb as hell, like someone took a model with normal proportions, laid it on its back, and stepped on it. It’s way too tall and wide for the depth. If you leave the shoulders off I think it would end up looking much better. Like Jelly I left the cape (dumb and large and flat) and some ropes across the chest off – they just added visual noise to the model.
Araknae Quad Accelerator Emplacement
Jelly: This felt like a very standard Heresy vehicle kit to put together. Quite a lot of repeated processes and a lot of mould lines made it a bit of a pig to put together, but it went together in 90 quite unfocused minutes while I watched some absurdist Australian sketch comedy in the background.
I think this box is full of marmite models and this will be one. I worry a lot of these spider-turrets are going to mainly see use as terrain. I’ve painted mine in a weathered metal scheme. I thought about painting more of the panels in Death Guard colours, then I remembered that the Sons of Mortarion aren’t much bothered about heraldry and they certainly wouldn’t care about a sentry turret. In my finite wisdom I painted this more like terrain than a normal model in my Dusk Raiders scheme, I started with a strong base of sprayed black, a basecoat of metals, sponged on some red details, seasoned it with washes and pigment powders, and added a dash of metal drybrushing, and did a final bit of glowy green lenses and eyes.
realSnice: This kit grew on me. I wasn’t thrilled about it when I was looking at the marketing but the profile is solid (a nice little Anti Infantry / AA option to round out a list) and feels very Imperial Fist. I intend to camp a HSS around it to take advantage of that 5++. The legs have an unnecessary amount of parts though and I wish it took less time to just build the base of the thing.
I kept the ball and legs separate while painting, airbrushing my yellow, masking, and then going back to airbrush metallics over the rest of the ball. The guns were also left off to easily airbrush and then glued on after the fact.
Credit: @badusernametag
Centurion in MKII Armour
Toby: This stocky bruiser stood out to me as the sleeper hit of this box straight away and I fought (and wrangled and badgered) to get them on my desk. It’s a really nice, heroic ‘resting’ pose, that I feel has a lot of room for modelling and painting options. Personally I’m really into the mid-tier Heroes of any army and I’m pleased to see Centurions getting centre stage for this new edition. I already have plans to make many. I’ve heard criticism of this model that it is over detailed or too ornate. But I disagree. It’s a really solid armour that would be perfect as an Iron Warrior or Imperial Fist, with some options for sparkle that could sell it as a Blood Angel or Son of Horus.
This is a great kit. Exactly what you’d expect of the new Heresy plastics. It picks up where the Praetors of second edition left off and runs with it all the way to Terra. It’s pose is better than those models and the details are much nicer. Two great head options and the Foof (dangly medallions, backbanner, servoskull etc) are all optional. So you can customise within the kit to personalise without adding anything. Having said that it is definitely a monopose kit. The fancy cape hooks into the shoulder pads, so movement in the arms isn’t an option and the mace haft even locks into grooves in the cape. So some proper conversion is necessary to personalise.
The aforementioned monopose/interlocking parts here could get you stuck. GW make very clever kits nowadays, but if the parts don’t go together just right the next bit doesn’t fit and this can knock on down the line. In this case it’s the cape. This comes in two parts, has to slot around the backpack and hook over both shoulder pads just so. My suggestion would be:
- Don’t stick it together as suggested in instructions.
- Get the right side on AND the weapon haft/hand in place.
- Then stick the left side on.
- If there’s a gap down the cape, join fill that.
This would be easier than cocking about with the hand joint etc.
As I said you will need to make some effort here to change the model’s weapons/pose. But there are some easy ways:
- Swap the Maul head for a Hammer to make it THUNDER.
- Swap the melta barrel for whatever else you want. (You’ve got loads of disintegrators right??)
Credit: @badusernametag
Planning a return to my WORLD EATERS of first edition I wanted to make this guy a little more brutal. So dropped the back banner for some skulls on spikes, swapped in a 40k Berserker head, added some chains etc. Then I cut off the maul head (as above) and replaced it with a hammer head. I want my centurions to lead from the front also, so I gave him a plasma pistol arm. To make this work I stuck the cape on first (loves me a cape!?) and then trimmed the pad back until I could slip it under. Then I glued it in and sculpted the cape back over the new arm with some green stuff. I also had to sculpt the right hand cape end in after I dropped the tiny piece with the clasp down a hole in my floor! (damn you floorboards?!?!). Last touch was a little barbed wire on the base, as I want my Eaters to be in the thick dirty mud of a trench. Think they now look suitably mean and ready for battering something to death in the 31st Millennium.
Jack: This is probably the worst modern GW kit I’ve built. Big capes like this are always problems, but this is by a mile the worst – following the instructions left the model unbuildable, and I had to rip stuff apart.
Like the Praetor, this model also has too many parts, even if it only comes in at 30. It means there’s a ton of detail and no areas that need to get smoothed out to make the molds functional, but it’s fiddly to put together, especially with some parts (like the dangling medals on the chest) not having good alignment indicators.
The big issue with it is the cape, which just doesn’t work. The instructions have you glue the backpack on, glue both halves of the cape together, then glue the cape on – this did not go together cleanly at all. I think the best approach is probably to not glue the cape together and attach each part one at a time to the assembled model – leaving the backpack off doesn’t help much because the cape actually weaves over part and under part of the backpack. This could all be fixed with a simpler cape that goes under the backpack completely, but no they needed to do it all fancy and make it suck ass to build. It’ll also block access to a lot of the model for painting, which is unsurprising, so I left the cape, backpack, maul, and servo skull separate. When putting it together after painting I needed to use a lot of force and if you look closely it’s not nicely aligned on the shoulder pads, plus the cape is covered in gaps (fortunately the largish one on the back is mostly hidden in a fold). All in all building this sucks, 0/10.
While not as polarizing an appearance as the Praetor, I don’t think it’s a good choice for the launch box as it’s too distinct. It’s covered in an exhausting amount of trim, and the only head options either have a giant broom or are bareheaded, and you have no choice but to put an overly baroque back banner on. For some legions, that’s perfectly fine – I think this would make a good Ultramarine or decent Blood Angel. For other legions, like Raven Guard or Alpha Legion, I think it’s too baroque for their more stripped down aesthetic.
MKII Crusade Pattern Tactical Squad (Veterans)
Credit: @badusernametag
Toby: Sack off those thicc Saturnine termies guys, I’m all about the MKII baby! This was always my fave armour pattern and I am chuffed to finally see it in plastic! Bigger, sharper and segmenteder than ever!?
The re-design is good. The helmets are chonky and the panels have a retro-scifi vibe that really works. It’s been done well.
Now these droogs are remarkably similar in pose to the MKVI beakies that came with HH2. They have all the same poses, only switched over to Crusade. Same as they did with the Iron Armour mid edition. This allows all the same arms, weapons and upgrades to fit seamlessly across the range and make all the armour marks compatible with all the upgrades. This is a fine and noble concept and I see why they went this way. I am a little sad to not see a new upgrade sprue though, that one power sword and plasma pistol are looking a little tired. The same five poses can get a little repetitive once repeated across armies, legions and the tabletops of games events…
The kits have developed well and they seem to have listened to feedback. Small changes to assembly making it a neater and cleaner process. The packs are all one part, shoulder pads are all one part, where you join a leg together there are little studs to line it up. All together this is deffo the smoothest Heresy marine assembly yet. Big fan.
Max: The MKII “redesign” is lovely. Definitely my favourite of the Astartes kits that have come out so far. One really annoying gripe is that you’ll need to shave off the thigh buckles to attach holsters (which themselves aren’t concave so the contact point is much smaller than it needs to be). It’s frustrating but doable. Otherwise it’s a lovely kit.
Credit: @badusernametag
Credit: @badusernametag
Sky Serpent: I had the opportunity to work on some of the fantastic new models from the Saturnine set and I chose the MKII marines as this is an armour I’ve been waiting to see in plastic for a long time as my Horus Heresy heart lies on Chogoris, this being the most prevalent armour mark of the White Scars.
A great kit and easy to put together and as Toby pointed out, there’s no split shoulder pad nonsense with more of a focus on simplicity. Something I did like is how the arms have little nodges on to make lining them up with the torso very simple but you can of course just cut these off to explore your own unique poses.
If, like me, you are a fan of the upgrade kits which one would assume are inevitably arriving further down the line then a tip I would share would be to glue the left shoulder pad and head with super glue as this will be easier to prise off if you decide to make such a change.
The MKII marines have more recesses than your Astartes of the 41st Millennium, which means they will lend themselves better to washes and drybrushing while leaving plenty of room for those who are a fan of edge highlighting too plus all your additional weathering techniques.
NotThatHenryC: I’ve put together ten of these MKII guys now, making a Veteran Squad with Volkite Chargers for my Raven Guard. Only five are properly done though. They took the different guns without any issues, which is no surprise as clearly they’re designed to be compatible with all the existing kits.
While it’s certainly nice not to have the split pads I did find there were some fairly substantial mould lines all along the arms and legs. They didn’t take long to remove but I imagine I’d get quite bored of doing that for 80 arms and legs. There’s also a sort of clip on the thighs, right where the pistol holster wants to go in the case of the left leg. I cut these off before sticking holsters on.
They’ve stuck with the five apparently sacred poses they use on the MKVI and MKIII, for reasons that are unclear to me. Actually this time they’ve made the kit as a bigger sprue, with two near-identical sprues of the same five poses in. It feels like a missed opportunity to give us some more options there. Even the bare heads they give you are identical.
I broke up the uniformity a bit with some bare heads. I wanted to use the transverse crest on the Sergeant though. I also gave him a chainsword taken from a Chaos Legionary, minus the various pointy bits. I think the more archaic look works for these.
Overall though these are minor gripes about what is a solid kit. They go together quickly but look good when built. They’re a huge upgrade on the older resin kit for MKII, looking far more believable. Personally I like them more than the MKVI or MKIII kits too. They feel more “heresy” than the MKVI and just somehow a bit better than the MKIIIs. Actually they’re a great match for the MKIIIs and do look like them, minus the extra plates you get on the MKIII.
I play Raven Guard and the rest of my army is in MKVI, so initially I wasn’t sure how to make these guys fit. Instead I decided to make them stand out on purpose, to mark them out as veterans. I went with an interpretation of a unification-era XIX Legion scheme I’d seen. I painted them grey instead of black using a sponge to build up highlights from Mechanicum standard grey through Dawnstone to Administratum grey. I like how this gives the armour a slightly textured look, a bit like you sometimes see on cast armour. It’s quite different to the smooth matt finish my other Raven Guard have.
Andrew_N: I had always wanted to build a Veteran/Reconnaissance/Seeker squad in MKII armor for my Salamanders, sporting the Badab War yellow and black camo scheme. So after getting my hands on the new plastics, I knew what I had to do! I built ten of the new guys, and overall I am very happy with them. I have quite a few of the old Forge World resin models in my collection, and these new models have alot more heft to them than they do. They just look CHUNKY – how you would expect early-model power armor (supposedly the first capable of going into space) to look. The return of the monovisor helmets also was a treat.
I wasn’t too thrilled about them having the same poses as the MKVI and MKIII kits at first (three-piece leg pose, we meet again), but I totally understand where that comes from, in terms of compatibility with the existing upgrade kits for the Heresy range. It also means I will have to try my hand at building my own MKV armor eventually, by just mixing parts from the same pose across marks. But overall, the kit builds easily and well, and looks solid when built. Bonus points to the one-piece backpacks, which drove me nuts with some of the older plastic Heresy kits. I even mixed in a couple of bits, giving my sergeant a slung bolter from the melee weapons sprue, and a helmet from the old MKII resin kits I had rattling around my bits box.
My Salamanders army is supposed to represent one of the last few contingents of mostly Terran veterans, so I always gravitated towards the older armor marks for them. Having both of the older armor marks in plastic now is a great thing, and I am thrilled we will be getting also MKII assault marines and MKIII breachers in the future as well!
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