Fiend From The Pit by Center Stage Miniatures

I had the pleasure of busting the chops of the main man responsible for Center Stage Miniatures at Gen Con this year. In exchange for my ribbing on the late 28mm Demons and Devils KS, and the fact that I used to actually do a lot of reviews back in 'da day', he provided me with an advance copy of Fiend from the Pit. Seeing that puppy's price on the Center Stage Miniature website reminds me of what a fantastic deal everyone got in terms of metal miniatures.

So what do you get when you buy, or receive this sucker?

First off, from what I understand, we'll receive our Kickstarter miniatures similar to this. Much like Bones, we're not getting full packaging. That's okay as extra packaging just means more stuff to throw out at the end of it all.

Breaking it out of the packaging, we have a main body with a tab. A tail. A head. Three wings. At first I thought that it was a mispack. I mean three wings? Especially if you look at the painted image at the Center Stage Miniature website.

Nope. Two of those wings glue together.

Ugh.

Let me repeat myself, ugh.

I would place this model at an intermediate to advance modeler pick. The head pops on with no problem. The wings do have studs that join to the back. The problem is that there isn't a lot of space molded to the wing outside of that stud. I'll probably add green stuff to support it.

The hand with the mace is a flat surface. You should probably pin that SOB or you're going to suffer.

The tail on the bottom? Another flat surface. Again, you should probably pin that.

In terms of putting the wings together? Man, there was a ton of bending on both wings to get it lined up fairly decently. I would love to see a tutorial on this. I am however, now terrified that other miniatures with wings will have the wings split like this and to be honest, I don't see a good reason for it. The other wing looks great. There's the join problem, but hey, this multi-piece wing has the same problem. To me it's just plain old bad design.

 

 

I snagged a few different shots of the miniature. I threw him on a resin base. It's not that the round lipped base it came with didn't fit but since I already had it out as I was considering putting it on one of them but didn't want to cut all that base work out... it wound up here.

In terms of sculpting... I'd have a hard time justifying paying the full price knowing what a PIA it is to assemble. Don't get me wrong, it's not impossible. I used some Kick Zap or Zap a Gap or whatever it's called because I hate assembling in the first place. But after playing with the Reaper Bones, which are all slotted? Oh yeah, this became an exercise in F*&*! you!

I've gone in to edit the post. I realized that I was a bit too down on it because of my anger at the assembly process. In doing so, I failed to note some of the other bits that are important to people.

Mold lines were invisible. This must be a very fresh miniature from the mold. I didn't have any clean up in that aspect. In terms of flack and excess from the vents? Minimal. Some on the wings and on the inside of the arm with the fire ball but very minor, very easy to clean and very quick to fix. If the other models in the series come this clean and ready to go, it'll make up for a lot of the short comings of the design.