I love paper miniatures. Yeah, I love metal and plastic ones, too. But minis that you can print and assemble in vast quantities are just really convenient. As more and more electronic publishers have entered the paper mini arena, the selection of minis has grown considerably. You can get fantasy, historical, sci-fi, modern, and just about anything else you want. Occasionally, somebody manages to do something really cool and innovative with their minis products, and that's where Inspired Device's Mirror Universe comes in.
Mirror Universe is a series of super-hero paper miniature PDFs. Each volume contains twelve paper miniatures done in the Batman/Justice League animated cartoon style. “Just twelve miniatures?” you might ask yourself. Yes, just twelve. But each of these characters gets its own page replete with not only a “tent-style” stand-up, but a flat square counter and a cool stand-up character display. And at $3.60 per volume, that's not a bad deal.
The character display stand-up is about 5.5” tall by 4” wide with space for you to write in the character's name. A full-size body portrait of the character that exactly matches the art on the miniature fills the display. This prop is a great addition to the gaming table, as it easily allows your fellow players to visualize what your character really looks like, what his name is, and just who is who on the tabletop. This is the most innovative part of the Mirror Universe line of products.
The flat counters are useful if you don't want to use the miniatures in your game. They're just flat square counters with a head-shot of a character and two arrows denoting the front facing of the counter. While a nice, easy addition to the sets, they don't do much for me in terms of style.
The miniatures themselves are “tent-style” pieces that are easy to put together. Indeed, anybody who has assembled any cardstock minis before will have no problem putting these together in no time flat. The art is the same as on the character display, down to the last detail. This is in no doubt thanks to the vector-based images used in the PDFs. No matter how you scale them, there is no loss of detail. The backs of the minis are a black silhouette of the front. Not exciting, but pretty standard with paper minis these days.
But how's the art? In my opinion, the art is great. If you're a fan of the Batman/Justice League cartoon style, you will love these minis. Each character has a Good and Evil version, though the two usually look nothing alike. In fact, the only thing they usually share in common is their name. There is a good deal of variety among the four volumes, including bricks, blasters, robots, cyborgs, angels, demons, wizards, speedsters, aliens, and more. The colors are bright and interesting, and the overall look is great.
In addition to full-color versions of these characters, Inspired Device has provided black and white line art versions as well. If you don't feel like sucking all the ink out of your printer, or you just want to color the characters yourself, these are quite handy.
Finally, Inspired Device has included condition “hats” that can be cut out and placed on the character displays to indicate various degrees of injury suffered by the respective character. Examples include, staggered/prone, stabilized/dying, dying/dead, etc. These are great tools for both GMs and players that provide a visual reminder of a character's status on the battlefield.
At the end of the file are brief bios of each character, good and bad. While brief, these bios do give you a place to start if you can't come up with a character concept on your own. Overall, they do a good job of instilling that comic book feel in the characters without pigeon-holing you into specific powers or abilities. While this is a Mutants & Masterminds Superlink product, no game stats are provided. So, if you want to crank out your 1980s-era Classic Marvel Super-Heroes RPG, you can freely use this product to do so.
There are a few minor flaws with Mirror Universe, however. First, each character gets his own page that contains the display, miniature, condition hats, and flat counter. But what if you just want to print out 10 robot goon minis? Well, you're stuck printing out ten pages of cardstock just to get ten tiny minis. This is a huge waste. It's too bad Inspired Device couldn't come up with web-based system like Politically Incorrect Games did for their Disposable Heroes line of paper minis. It would be a lot more convenient to download a whole army of robot goons on one page than print one goon on each of ten pages.
My only other complaint is the lack of any truly big brick-type characters like the Thing or the Incredible Hulk. Some of the characters, like Monolite, seem to be bruisers, but it's hard to tell. I think a tank-tossing, mean-spirited, irradiated brute would be a great addition to the Mirror Universe, um, universe.
In conclusion, Mirror Universe is a solid, attractive, and inexpensive product that and super-hero gamer or paper miniature aficionado would be happy to have on their hard drive or table-top. Check out the entire Mirror Universe line at Inspired Device.
