My blog has two followers already, thank you guys. The first was Jabberwocky, a friend of mine I know from the Reaper forum. So, especially for him, a review of the jabberslythe model. Sorry Sean, don’t have any jabberwocky miniature to present it.
The original text was published at Chest of Colors site. This one here is a slightly modified version.
Jabberslythe is a Games Workshop model following the “We-need-big-monsters” trend assumed some time ago by that company. It was released as a part of their (in)famous Finecast range of resin miniatures.
This huge beast, barely fitting the 100 x 50 mm base it comes with, is packed in the standard GW box. Its size is also well reflected in pricing. You can buy Jabberslythe for 42 GBP (69 USD, 55 €). For that price you will get 14 pieces requiring cleaning and assembly and a plastic rectangular base. These bits are of course attached to few sprues. Frankly speaking, all the stories about quality of Finecast models caused that I was pretty nervous while checking my copy of Jabberslythe. After all, that’s a lot of money I paid for it. The first quick look was actually pretty reassuring, but then I’ve started to check every single piece.
As you can see, there are no problems with the cast. Bits are clean, details quite crisp, no air bubbles. What happened to the frame though?
It’s so heavily deformed, that in few cases resin bits connecting elements within the sprue were broken. I’m pretty sure that all this had an impact on shape of individual pieces. We’ll get back to it later. Another frame, another issue. Lots of flash requiring cutting off. Nothing really problematic, but it will add some time during preparation of the mini for painting.
More examples of deformed frames and flash:
There are not many mould lines, but some of them will be annoying to remove, especially one across teeth of the beast. I haven’t seen any air bubbles on bigger surfaces, but it is really clear that GW has problems with smaller, thinner elements.
You can see that spikes are cast poorly. Such imperfection could be found on almost every similar piece of this model. My first thought was that this is not a real problem, as it is a chaos monster. Casting mistakes like broken spikes can easily by justified or hidden (e.g. air bubble is a wound leaking with blood). What would happen though if I bought a slick eldar tank or elven mage? I guess I wouldn’t be too happy in such case. After checking quality of the cast I tried to fit few elements. There are several pieces with pegs or slots which should make assembly easy.
It should, but it doesn’t. Gaps between different parts are sometimes extremely wide. I wonder if deformations shown above contributed to this problem.
Man, you will need a lot of putty to fill these! Many companies already proved that you actually can cast a multi-part model which requires just a minimal amount of gap filling. GW, please, ask them how to do it or at least add some green stuff to every box!
The sculpt itself is nothing special. I usually like big monsters, and this one is no exception, but some of the painters may be looking for something more… sophisticated. On the other hand, it’s a model provided for gamers and it will sure look impressive on the gaming table.
So, do I recommend this model? Well, if you’re not a gamer, there are more interesting alternatives for your collection on the market. If you’re a gamer (with a WFB Beastmen army) you’ll probably get this one no matter what I’ve written here.
As a final word I’d like to repeat my request: GW, get to work and improve the quality!
Now, do you know any other company, any, which keeps releasing substandard, overpriced products, yet customers come back for more? Failed casts are not and cannot be a surprise anymore, yet I hear this all the time: "Man, I got trash from them again".
Again? Why don't you do what you do with any supplier of faulty products and services - change it!
That's the power of Games Workshop. You will come back for more.
