Heresy Miniatures Review - Painless Joe

After the excitement of Salute has finally died down, it’s back to actually painting the lead that I bought. The Frugal Gamer always paints or plays what he buys, remember? I’m keen to start playing blood bowl so I want to get my Dwarf team painted up, but of course this means getting my backlog of Necromunda figures cleared.
Here they are in all their glory:

From the left they are: A converted Gripping Beast Celtic warrior, Kallistra Fantasy Zombie, EM4 savage with autogun and a converted Games Workshop Empire Flagellant.
I’m quite pleased with the neon colour effects I achieved on the autogun gang member. I deliberately tried some bright colours on this mini as I want to have some bright colours on my dwarf team. So expect to see lots of trendy dwarfs in the coming weeks.

Painless Joe
The other miniature I’ve recently got painted is ‘Painless Joe’ from Heresy miniatures, which I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I picked this mini up at Salute after seeing it on the Heresy website and thought it would make a fantastic Heavy armed with heavy stubber.

In my opinion Heresy produce some of the best miniatures on the market and Joe is no exception. The moulding is crisp with little flash or mould lines to be removed, though any present are easily cleaned off in the usual manner.

Many of Heresy’s Miniatures are multipart and Joe comes in 5 parts; main body and right leg, left leg and concrete block, minigun and hands, ammunition pack and feed belt.
Whenever I put together any multipart miniature, I always pin the joints for extra strength, which is what I did on Joe. Due to the number of parts there is a lots of pinning required; this should only be attempted by those with a little modelling experience, especially as some of the pieces are quite narrow. The only problem I encountered was fitting the feed mechanism from the ammo pack to the gun, trying to bend both ends to line up while maintaining a natural curve was tricky and took a frustrating 10 minutes.
It’s well worth the effort to get Joe assembled; he’s in an amazing dynamic pose, his trenchcoat billows naturally and the gun looks very mean. The level of detail is amazing and the sculptor has done a fantastic job giving a determined look on the face and even the sunglasses are of a modern square framed type.

The only fault I have is the lack of detail on the ammo backpack, It may have been left blank for people to add their own designs, but I would have preferred a small amount of detail to break up the expanse. Maybe two packs could be be included with the miniature, one blank and one detailed? Though that would, of course, increase the cost

When it comes to painting Joe, there is plenty to get done. I chose three main colours (purple, yellow and green - strange, I know) and stuck to them. It would be tempting to add too much colour and make to look messy. If was a little tricky accessing all parts of the miniature for painting, as the ammo belt and weapon are in the way a lot of the time, this is not a major hassle, but in future I would paint these seperately and add them on later.

I’m happy with the overall result, but this isn’t a review of my painting, it’s a review of the miniature, so lets go to the frugal conclusion...

The Frugal Conclusion
Painless Joe is an excellent example of Frugal gaming. I could have bought half a dozen cheap miniatures for the same money as for Joe, but would I have painted them all, and would they have looked as good on the table? I’m pretty certain that the answer to both these questions would be NO.

Joe costs £5, or £4 each if you buy two or more, this is not cheap, but the quality is excellent and you’ll be admiring this miniature for years to come, not bad for a fiver. I highly recommend this to anyone involved in sci-fi or modern gaming, or anyone who wants a fantastic display model. Get over there and buy one... go... go now!

It you are a manufacturer or supplier who would like to have a product reviewed, click the link on the right hand side of the page for more details on ‘The Frugal Challenge’, or send me an e-mail via my profile page.