The Halo releases from the first quarter of the year are now with customers, and Thundercloud looks at the terrain pack.
This product was not received for free; Thundercloud paid for it with his own money.
The UNSC scenery set provides you with ten pieces of scatter terrain (two copies of five different terrain pieces) to make your board a bit more Halo. It’s best paired with the existing card terrain in the Halo Spartan or Recon edition, adding more cover and clutter to the board that isn’t cubes and gives a bit more visual interest. While the Deluxe Buildable 3D terrain set is available (a repacking of the Deadzone plastic terrain) a small box of scatter terrain is a lot less work to get painted and on the table than building the terrain from sprues (I’ve got a lot of it in the shed that’s been waiting to be built and painted for a decade now, and it isn’t getting done anytime soon).
For me this is about time; the card terrain is very low effort, high reward in terms of getting a table sorted, and adding plastic scatter terrain that can be painted in a couple of evenings is a low time way of making that table look better.
The pieces themselves are four large pieces, that can completely conceal a Halo model behind and six smaller pieces that provide partial cover. They come pre-assembled, and apart from the ammo boxes, all the pieces are multi-part if you look carefully. This was only an issue with the generators, where they were slightly misaligned.
Painted up, they look like this.
I experimented with two different painting methods, traditional and contrast, to see how much difference it made.
The left ammo box was done with contract Ork Flesh, followed by an Athonian Camoshade wash and a gentle edge drybrush of Moot Green.
The right ammo box was done with three thin coats of Citadel Air Caliban Green, a light drybrush of Waaagh Flesh and a line highlight of Moot Green.
I think the ammo box on the right looks substantially nicer, but it did take substantially longer, and the Citadel Air paint needed three layers for a good dark green.
The white cargo boxes were very simple, and consisted of Citadel Contrast Apothecary white over a white undercoat, with a White Scar drybrush.
The shield was one of the larger scenery pieces, and the metal was done with a basecoat of Scale 75 Black Metal followed by a light drybrush/edge highlight of Vallejo Model Air Chrome.
Conclusion
The scenery set comes assembled and can be used out of the box, and if you wish to paint it can be completed in a couple of evenings. I used traditional hand painting, but an airbrush would substantially speed up laying the base colours down. I think it adds to the Halo battlefield, and the scatter looks substantially nicer than the card buildings by not being more cubes, breaking up the battlefield and making it less ‘gamey’ or ‘Minecraft-y’.
For £25 it’s okay price wise, though more expensive and I wouldn’t have purchased it and my John Halos would just fight over terrain someone had bedazzled in skulls.
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