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Review of PzKpf IV LOKI
I picked up the LOKI while browsing the newly-stocked items at my local gaming shop. I tend to buy miniatures eclectically, for looks, rather than to fill out my armies, although I do play several miniatures wargames. My pockets just aren't deep enough to support very many games. ;)
To me, the LOKI has a striking and interesting appearance. The blister pack has a picture of a fully painted and assembled LOKI on the cover, and DP9 has managed to create a 'realistic' looking bipedal war machine which nevertheless embodies the 1940's WWII technological oeuvre.
My glee continued to increase when I brought it home and opened the blister pack. The usual miniature is at most made up of a few pieces. The LOKI, however, is made up of many small parts, roughly a dozen, with most attached to sprues, of course. It's more like a model in white metal than a typical miniature. I think the hobbyists among us will enjoy this approach... building the LOKI is a bit of a challenge. By the same token, less-adept modellers and younger players will probably find this a chore, rather than a pleasure.
The Gear Krieg robotic vehicles are not merely walking war-machines, but transformers. They can switch from a wheeled mode, for rapid travel, to the walking mode, which presumably offers better tactical ability. However, the miniatures are not toys, and cannot themselves transform from walker to car, or be built as one or the other. DP9 sells them seperately in walking and wheeled modes.
This is the walker version of the LOKI, and can be built in 3 variations. The "A"-type variant is a roofless machine, built without arms, and using both the grenade launcher weapon and the light machine gun weapon. The "B" and "C" variants are identical, in terms of what you can equip them with, but can be built either in a 'buttoned-up' mode, with the roof closed, or an 'open' mode, with the roof's hatch open and the included commander figure looking out from the top of his machine. This second choice, while probably the neatest-looking way to build the miniature, is also the most complex, since you have to take the roof hatch, which comes as a single, separate piece, and cut it apart along a seam line, then glue the pieces to either side of the 'hinge' details on the roof surface. Note that this is not obvious, in fact I may be wrong, but it's what I decided to do after close scrutiny of the cover image.
It was only after playing with the pieces, mock-assembling the miniature, and setting down to filing that my enthusiasm began to pall.
Although on initial examination, the pieces look crisply molded (the angular main body, for example, is all hard edges and perfect proportions, which makes me think it was designed and modelled with the aid of CGI, or a very good draftsman/sculptor), a number of casting flaws became apparent after a closer look.
The main body appeared to suffer a very slight mold mis-alignment. Being composed of a top half and a bottom half, the mold lines run through the center of the side planes. The mis-alignment resulted in a sort of slight concavity in the surfaces, which would be difficult to address with simple filing. Instead, I applied a very thin layer of putty the surface, then sanded that smooth.
More problematic were the legs, which were apparently composed of left and right halves. In this case, the mold lines run through inset detail on the legs, requiring you to fit a narrow file into some very tight places. I still haven't figured out how I'm going to clean that up... I'm thinking of digging out a burnishing ball, or taking a needle file and bending part of the tip so I can reach the affected parts.
One last thing before I summarize: DP9 has taken to including decal sheets into their miniatures, and the LOKI is no exception, coming with a postage-stamp-sized sheet of appropriate decals.
A note on ratings: For miniatures, I consider Style to be paramount... it is, after all, a visual work. Substance covers factors such as ease of assembly, value, and applicability.
Style-wise, the LOKI is great. It's convincing, seems appropriate for the time it is trying to depict, and just has a very high coolness factor. The Gear Krieg designs manage to find new ground for unique visual appearance, between obviously anime-inspired designs or the boxiness of Battletech.
Substance-wise, I've got some issues. My biggest disappointment was the casting quality. These are brand-new miniatures coming from brand-new molds. Although the problems with the main body are easy enough to fix, the legs are a problem, and their molds should probably be redesigned. My second disappointment is value-for-money. This just is not a very large miniature, and I don't think it justifies its price. Fortunately, you don't need a lot of them to build a functional army for Gear Krieg, but if you are putting together such an army, you may want to find ways of buying at a discount. Look for sales at your local shop, or online discount retailers. My next two criticisms aren't really big disappointments, just caveats. This is a complex miniature, with many small parts. I can't recommend it for beginning hobbyists. It is also a miniature with low applicability for other settings. As a mecha, it too perfectly captures the WWII feeling, and would seem too primitive placed next to miniatures from an advanced technology, and too advanced for miniatures designed for a Steampunk setting. Finally, at 15mm scale, it doesn't mesh in well, size-wise, with any other sci-fi wargame I can think of... too large in scale for Battletech or CAV, too small for VOR or Warhammer 40K.
