Where to begin, where to begin...
I currently live in a small town, with no local gaming stores. Usually, I acquire games and supplies through online stores, but last month, I decided to travel to a nearby city in order to visit a real store. While there, I did some impulse shopping, and one of the items I purchased was Delphan Gruss, a miniature for GW's new 54mm wargame, Inquisitor.
What initially attracted me to the miniature was the overall impact of its appearance. On first glance, Gruss is a menacing, robed and hooded figure, with a bunch of mechanical claws on tentacles springing from his back, a gun in one hand, and a large drill grafted onto the other.
For those of you who haven't seen any Inquisitor miniatures in your local store, they all come in small boxes, about 5"x6"x1", and the parts are stored in plastic containers inside. Now, there are good and bad aspects to this packaging system. On the one hand, it has to be more expensive than the industry-standard blister pack, and you can be sure that we're the ones paying for it. On the other hand, the large box size allows them to display color photos of the assembled and painted miniature, useful as a construction and painting guide. The plastic container could also be useful... while the assembled miniature is too large to fit back into it, it's just dandy for storing bits.
Speaking of which, when you get through all the packaging, that's what you find. Lots of bits.
Here's a link from GW's online store, showing a photo of the box covery, and the individual bits from the box.
There's a little warning on the box package that contents may vary from those shown. I had read somewhere that GW would be releasing bits packages for the game, containing alternate arms, weapons, devices, etc. This made me think that there might be a randomized-component element to the miniatures, similar to Cell Entertainment's Krash, Lab, Ronin, and Hybrid games. As it turns out, though, that's not the case. My Delphan Gruss contained the parts shown.
And as you can see, that's a lot of parts. Separated from their sprues, it comes to 18 separate pieces. I should add that the 'Power Conduits' and 'Servo Claws' are going to need some drilling and pinning... while some of the pieces have connection stubs and sockets built in, most don't.
This gives rise to the first major criticism I have of Delphan Gruss. This is not a miniature for beginners. Delphan Gruss is an intricate model with a lot of parts, especially for a metal miniature. While drilling and pinning is not the most advanced model-building technique, it does require specialized equipment and materials, as well as a great deal of patience. I think that GW should put warning labels on these boxes indicating that a certain degree of skill is required, especially considering that GW makes an effort to target younger gamers.
My next criticism is about the miniature's casting quality. One of GW's justifications for the high cost of its minis is that they are supposedly of high quality. I did not find this to be the case with Delphan Gruss. While one does expect to find mold lines and flash on their miniatures, many of Delphan's bits had above-average flash. More than this, I think the casting process was rather badly designed. In many cases, mold lines run directly across areas of raised surface detail. If you look at the pictures of the bits, you can see that the servo claws are actually connected to each other with short lengths of sprue.
Finally, the fitting of several major pieces is rather poor. The legs, for example, are cast in two parts... which don't have any kind of alignment or guide stubs. When fitted together, there are major gaps between both halves. If you align them by trying to minimize the gaps in the hip and thigh regions, the feet are out of true. While the tabard piece serves to cover the gap from the front, you are still going to have to fill the gap from the back. The right arm also has a gap between the shoulder and the torso. The left arm, while a better fit, is sculpted as a bare arm... it simply projects from the robe-covered torso with no hint of a sleeve, although this could also be considered to be an aesthetics flaw.
Which brings me to my last major criticism of the miniature. While the overall appearance of Delphan Gruss is rather striking, when subjected to scrutiny, a lot of elements fail to pass muster. For me, the biggest disappointment is his face. When you peer into the hood, it looks as though the sculptor just created a flat face surface, then pushed bits onto it, Mr. Potato Head fashion. This results in an off-kilter visage... mechanical eyes resembling jeweler's loupes are placed slightly off-center, and way too high for a human face. The lower part of the face is dominated by a positively pachydermic dangling hose-nose. Taken together, it looks amateurish and goofy.
I feel that I should explain my Style and Substance ratings for this miniature before I summarize.
Stylewise, I still think that Delphan Gruss can be a striking miniature... from a distance. In fact, many people may not notice or care about the nitpicking flaws I perceive on close observation. That's why I gave it an average Style.
In terms of Substance, there is one major factor lowering its rating. That is the fact that this miniature is useful only in the context of an Inquisitor game, or as a display piece. There are no other science fiction wargames which require 54mm miniatures. Even if there were, it is highly unlikely that priestly cybernetic gun-totating Dr. Octopus wannabes would be common characters. Even if the casting quality of the miniature were superb, I couldn't give it a higher Substance rating than a 3... and it's casting quality is poor.
What else can I say about it? If you do play Inquisitor, I would think very carefully before purchasing Delphan Gruss to use as a game piece. Even if the aesthetic flaws don't concern you, the amount of work it will take to assemble him is considerable, and he's likely to be rather fragile, with all those slender tentacles.
If you don't play Inquisitor, then you should think doubly hard before buying him. As an art piece... there are other miniatures which have a much higher aesthetic quality. Even within the Inquisitor line, there are other miniatures that, at first glance, have more aesthetic appeal. It was primarily a matter of cost and availability which lead me to select Delphan Gruss as an impulse buy. On the other hand, Delphan looks to be fun to convert. Myself, I'm currently sculpting a new head on from kneadatite, and I'm planning to add a suggestion of a sleeve to his left arm.
One last comment: price. The Inquisitor miniatures are actually quite reasonable this way, especially for GW. Currently, I'm also working on a CAV miniature from Reaper, a line of giant robot miniatures which are somewhat larger than FASA's Battletech minis. Delphan stands about a head taller than the CAV, which sells for a bit over ten dollars. I also have several Ronin miniatures in close proximity. While they are quite a bit larger than either Gruss or the CAV, they are similar in being multi-part miniatures with exchangeable bits. They sell for fifteen dollars. So, relative to other large-scale metal miniatures, Delphan Gruss doesn't come out too bad price-wise. I'd say you were getting a fair price for the miniature if you could find a 25-30% discount. That's a pretty good recommendation from me, considering that in my opinion, most GW miniatures cost at least twice what they are worth.
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