Just before Christmas we saw the release of the awesome Slaves to Darkness Army Set, and today the rest of the range is released! In this review we will be unboxing all of the kits, checking out the sprues and seeing what the kits are like put together! We also manage to paint up a Daemon prince and magnatise it to make all weapon options swapable!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending free copies of these kits over to us to unbox and share on the site! If you would like to support the site when why not order your Slaves to Darkness through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself 20% too?

We also have a full unboxing of the kits that you can watch below or over on YouTube – We will be painting these models up over the next few weeks, so make sure to tune in at 7pm UK time on YouTube or Twitch!

So I think it’s safe to say that people had been looking forward to the full Slaves to Darkness wave landing, and today we have all of the kits and the Battletome itself up for pre order!

First up we have the Daemon Prince – while this was in the Army Set, the instructions in this box also allow you to build it up as a 40k Daemon Prince

For this review I wanted to see if I could magnatise the various options in order to make the various pieces swapable.

As you can see from the pictures above I was able to make all 3 weapon options swapable by drilling out the wrist and the hands of each weapon and affixing a small magnet – as the parts are not too heavy they dont need to be too strong, just enough to keep the hand in place! I did attempt to make the wings and trophy rack swapable – however I feel pins would be needed in order to do this properly, and sadly the clock was ticking to get the model painted in time for the review!

Next up we have the new Exhaulted Hero – this is a really nice kit with the option of arming him with a shield or two hand weapons, and there are actually two different head options on the sprue too

I’m very excited to get some paint on this model, but here’s how he looks assembled and primed! i love the look of the bear head and shield, so had to build him up this way!

It wouldnt take too much work to made the shield/two hand weapon options swapable if you again have a bit of a play with magnets

The next kit up is Eternus Blade of the First Prince. What surprised me about this box is the fact that it is actually a duel build that can also make the Chaos Lord on Daemonic Steed.

This is a really nice kit with lots of parts with only the core of the horse being shared between the two builds

If you wanted to do a nice Knights of the Empty Throne army, you could probably use a lot of these spare parts to convert up some Varenguard to add a bit of variety to your army. With so much of the kit being different though I don’t see any easy way to make this magnetisable between Eternus and the Lord however.

Another kit I had been really looking forward to was the new Chaos Knights

This is a really interesting kit as it’s actually made up of the original push fit Chaos Knights kit that was included within the Slaves to Darkness Start Collecting box – however it also includes an additional sprue that can be used to build the optional Command models (You can choose to build without these if you want though)

While the original kit was push fit however, the command options actually need to be glued – which actually took me by surprise while building it. For clarification the box doesn’t actually state its a push fit kit either, I had just assumed it would be based on the original kit. If you are using glue to stick it together I would recommend shaving a little off each peg, otherwise the glue can actually cause the parts to not fit correctly – which is a common problem when using glue on a push fit set, as they are actually engineered to go together without the extra couple of mm caused by the glue on each join.

Finally we have the band new Chaos Warriors

This is a full multipart kit unlike the push fit ones included in the old Start Collecting set, and there are options here for different weapons , alternate poses and different heads to ensure that even a unit of 20 will all look different

While still having multiple parts, the core of them is still pretty chunky with not many pieces needed for each model, which makes building them really quick and easy to do while still leaving you lots of options for making them individual. I opted for the halberds solely based on rule of cool – at the moment the more “competitive” option would probably be the swords! But I dont care, they look really nice and I can’t wait to get some paint on them!

It’s worth noting that a couple of these new kits are actually contained within the new Vanguard box – which combined with the Army Set gives you a massive chunk of a Slaves to Darkness army without needing to pick up much more! As they are a low model count army they also lend themselves to both newcomers and those who want to go to town with painting!

As mentioned earlier we’ll be painting these up on the weekly painting stream each Sunday at 7pm – so make sure to tune in to see how we get on! As they are painted I’ll be updating this post too!

The new Slaves to Darkness models are up for pre order today and are released Saturday 21st January

Games Workshop sent Sprues & Brews free copies for review purposes

Published by Matt Crowther

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