I recieved my first Drake box the other day, and I must say first impressions are a bit mixed tending towards underwhelming.

There are a few issues, 3 of my little mansized demon things are missing both the face/head part and one arm, and the dragon wth the large, bent over resin piece has some bad mould lines in it and also an arm. One metal warrior has a fault line (as opposed to a mold line) apart from this the rest seems ok quality casts. I have not gone very thoroughly through them yet though. When I have, I will contact AGM to request re

placements for the badly cast and missing bits. I hope thay are as service minded as my impression of them indicated.

I am sorely disappointed in the masked aztec-style warriors not having masks, I really think they would have been much better if they stuck to the masked renders. Those were actually a reason to go for this kickstarter. I do not really like the new ones at all. Maybe they will be better once i make some masks for them to hide those hideous little mis-shapen heads.

Also Bastille is way smaller than I expected. For some reason I had the impression that he would be somehting like twice the height of a normal man, but it is just a regular mansized figure.

Apart from that I have only had time to clean up one of the dragons (the standing aquatic one) and my first impressions are:

This piece is all metal with a resin base with the feet sculpted on. Many parts. reasonably easy to see where each part goes.

The dry fit of the pieces seems to be good, apart from the three neck and head-parts where the holes are too small for the oversized pegs. After cutting the pegs they seem to fit fine.

A bit of flash and moldlines all around, but nothing horrible. I had gotten used to the new plastics and resins and have almost forgotten about all the pains prepping metal models, especially large ones like this.

This will need to be pinned at most joints. There will be gaps needing to be filled. The back piece with the spinal horns especially has alot of space around it.

Completely smooth skin, not much detailing apart from general musculature, and no deep details at all. I expect this will not take drybrushing very well.

Stylistically all the Drake dragon figures I have got seem rather featureless, as in not having much or even any skin detail such as scales, bumps or anything, Pretty smooth all around, and a lot of the detail there is being rather shallow, I don’t know if this is because of the “tru scale” 28mm (meaning the figures are rather small compared to, say Reaper or Warhammer.  These seem to be in scale with many Mantic and some of the sedition wars figures), if it is purely a stylistic choice by the makers or a limitation when making the renders. It is certiainly not what I am used to. I am undecided whether I like this or not. It certainly makes it more challenging to paint and make look good, as I suck at freehand. I expect many of these will get creative colour schemes with patterns and what not.

Maybe they will grow on me. I really do like the sheer imaginativeness in the varied designs and creatures, and the dragon designs certainly are quite unique. I am looking forward to getting the rest of the figures cleaned up and ready.

In general, due to the scale many of the weapons are very thin bladed, and bend easily. Many joints to be glued are too thin for driling. I expect many of these  will fare badly with handling during play and moving about between games, and will require frequent re-gluing.

Most of the details I have seen on the smaller figures, have been quite crisp though.

on second reading of what I have written I see I might a come across as far more negative than I actually am. I really do like the sculpts (apart from those masked ones not being masked), and find that the smoothness in the dragons made it comparatively easy to clean them up, as the resin material is easy to carve and scrape to make smooth. It is probably just that I am not used to the smoothness.

I have also cleaned up the landlubber dragon and the thin winged one, and find that there are some problems with oversized pegs not fitting in the holes with there as well, and airbubbles at the very tips of the wings/claws make them shorter and blunt instead of pointy. overall the fit of the parts are quite good, especially the resin parts have all been spot on (after cleaning up and cutting off some rather large bits of sprue here and there.)

The belly keel / plate-thing on the Rish.dragon is probably a redesigned feature, not flash or sprue.I think it is meant to be a sort of combat blade or ram used when charging (acts as a cleaver when jumping on?) smaller enemies. Mine was had a corner broken off, though it is the only resin part I see that has snapped. The material seems very durable. The plate of horns I think are loose horns on a bit of sprue, the horns should fit in the sockets around its cheeks.

Casting quality-wise, most metal bits I have cleaned has had rather small mould lines, easily cleaned up. The flash I have encountered has also been easlily cleaned up. The overall fit of the parts i have encountered has been good. Larger bits of Dragon in metal will need some filling because of gaps, I expect the metal shrinks a bit when cast.

At any rate I think I have identified why I was underwhelmed by the first shipment.

It was not so much the figures being disappointing in themselves, of bad quality or anything like that. In fact most of the figures are really good, if a bit on the small side and with too delicately thin parts here and there.

 

It is simply a case of which figures I got, and which ones I specifically was looking forward to (and were not in this shipment).

In the shipment there were four dragons, but only the Rish was one of the original main dragons. I really wanted the garrick and saan,

there were not many “monsters” – just corbrulo, the two dragonkin, the great master (yay!) and the minor demon and eye-being.

and the rest were humans or human equivalents, including the mobi- and drak-riders. They are actually quite nice, just not the main draw for me.

So basically I got a highly anticipated heavy box filled with figures, and out of all of them were only four or five I had really been looking forward to, the others not being the ones I expected (for some reason many of the pictured minis from the KS and AGMs site were not in this shipment). Add to that the disappointment over the kayamayuk unmasked and the small bastille, well. Underwhelmed.

I am certainly not regretting going all in on this one, and am looking forward to getting the rest of the minis in.

 

Any one else care to comment on the Drake figures? What do you think?