During the Horus Heresy it was not just the Space Marine Legions that shattered in Civil War, the forces of the Mechanicum also split in that schism – with half their number staying loyal and the rest siding with the Warmaster Horus.

Armed with arcane weaponry and accompanied with Battle Automata, the Mechanicum are a fighting force quite unlike those of the Astartes or the Solar Auxilia. With the Mechanicum Battle Group box, up for pre order today, you can finally field an army of these in plastic in your games of Warhammer The Horus Heresy!

In this unboxing and review we’ll be checking out the contents of the box, seeing what you get for your money and building and painting them up to show what they look like in the flesh!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us a free review copy to check out on the site! If you would like to support the site then why not order your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full video unboxing which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s crack open the box and see what’s inside!

Mechanicum Battle Group Unboxing and Review

Plastic Mechanicum! It’s something we’ve all wanted for years, and recently became more realistic with the growing plastic Solar Auxilia range for Horus Heresy. I’ve wanted to put together a Mechanicum army for a long time, but the price in resin has been a little too high in order to do a realistic force.

Thankfully however that is now a thing of the past and it’s suddenly become a whole lot easier to put together the core elements of a Mechanicum army (And I suspect we’ll be getting a whole load more plastic kits soon after this box is released!)

Inside the box (Which retails at £130) we get a whole stack of plastic that builds up a Triaros Amoured Converor, 6 Thallax (With a choice of weapon options), 2 Castellax Battle-Automata and 20 Tech Thralls.

That is a lot of kits and gives you around 500-600 points of a Mechanicum army, including most of the Line choices you will need, giving you a great starting point for either an allied detachment or a full force.

Based on the previous resin kits this would cost you just shy of £400 for the equivalent (With the Triaros costing almost as much as this entire box), so certainly is a lot more palatable and goes a long way to making the army easier to get into.

Also in the box are two brand new transfer sheets with a whole host of icons and symbols to use on your models – I do hope that Forge World take this opportunity to re-release some of the older discontinued transfer sheets (I’ve painted mine as Xana II – and the only place you can find these transfers now are on the Malinax section of the Heresy Knight Transfer sheet.

This is another box that actually works great with picking up 2 of them too – that then gives you 6 line units and 2 transports, the perfect springboard to add units to flavour to round out your Mechanicum army!

So let’s take a look at the assembled and painted models and chat about how they were to put together

Triaros Armoured Conveyor

The big centrepiece model in the box is the Triaros Armoured Conveyor – and as far as Dedicated Transports go this is probably one of the coolest in the game. It might seem overkill for carrying a unit of Thralls, but it just looks so good – and with Flare Shields it’s also likely to be able to get your units to where they need to be. Assembly was really easy with a “rib” construction making the curved main body of it – There’s some noticeable joins on this on mine which I hoped would get hidden on priming it, so if I got a second one I’d take a file or some glue to the join to blend it a little more – the opposite side of the tank is fine, so I’ve probably just misaligned a piece causing the small gap. Despite this small error of mine when building it, it was a fun construction, and I can imagine a lot of this will be reused for other varients of the tank – something that the Specialist Games Studio has done great work with when designing Heresy sprues.

Weapon options are fixed, but you have the option of adding two hunter killer missiles, which you can see attached to the top canopy.

Castellax Battle-Automata

Another one of the standout kits are the Castellax Battle Automata – these were always a really cool kit in resin, so getting the opportunity to build them in resin is even better! They do have multiple weapon options – however you only get one of each special weapon in the kit, and only one set of blades for the arms (You can build both with fists and the bolt cannon though if you wish). It’s a shame you don’t get the parts to give them both the same special weapon, as it’s a legal option in the list, so if you want multiples with the same weapon you’re going to have to pick up multiple boxes. That said, they will work out a lot cheaper than the resin kits, and you’re probably going to want a few dedicated units with different weapon loadouts anyway. I’ll be picking up another one of these boxes at launch so I can have 2 of each weapon to add some versatility to the army.

Building them was really easy, and if you have some patience you can most likely make the weapons swappable too – though for this review I just decided to build them with a fixed loadout.

Thallax

While not as large as the Castellax, I think the most popular kit in this box are going to be the Thallax. These were a gorgeous Forge World kit, and one of the more effective units in the Mechanicum list, and now they are an absolute dream to build with the new plastic kit. Unlike the Castellax these contain 2 of each special weapon, meaning you can build either one large squad of 6 with 2 weapons, or two smaller units of 3 (each with a different special weapon if you wish, or both armed the same way)

There’s also a few detailed heads that can be used to indicate your special weapons, or to make each unit look different. Personally I love the flat black heads – but I’ve used the more detailed ones on the heavier weapons to perhaps represent some more advanced targeting systems.

They do have a lot of parts, but are far less fiddly to build that the old resin ones. All optional upgrades are also present on the sprue, so you can put these together however works best for you. I suspect these will be sold in boxes of 6 once they are available individually, and I reckon they will fly off the shelves when they do!

Tech Thralls

The final kit in the box are a complete re-imagining of the Tech Thralls – Gone is their old look, and they now instead have a more zombie-like vibe which suits the theme of a horde of mindless bodies being thrown forward as cannon fodder.

These are really cool models, however they were a little frustrating to build (And took longer to build that the rest of the box combined) because they have 13 pieces per model. For something that is around 4 points each and you’ll be running in units of 20-30 I really think these should have had a more quick and easy process to building them. Now, I will say that the many, many parts means that you have a lot of variety in heads arms and general pose across the unit – but I’ve have happily had copy paste ones with the same pose if it meant getting them on the battlefield was a little quicker.

I’ve gone for quite a drab scheme for these, but there’s a surprising amount of detail here with all the pipes and wires, and you could easily go to town with them – for me though I wanted something quick and easy to get to the battlefield as soon as I can.

Again, I’ll be picking up another box to pad out the army, but I think building 40 in total is about as many as I can stomach! On the plus side though, these will be a lot cheaper than the resin ones, and so if you want to go full horde Mechanicum (6 units of 30 to swarm the board?) then it’s a lot more achievable now!

Summary

So what do I think of the new Mechanicum Battle Group, and is it worth the price?

Well, I’ve been wanting to do a Mechanicum army for years, and with them now available in plastic it’s made that dream become a reality – and I think a lot of people will be thinking the same. For £130 I think this set is a bargain, and unlike some similar boxes it really does give you all the building blocks you need to put together and army, with multiple sets being a decent way of getting the core of your army. Hopefully this sticks around long enough for people to use as the foundation of a force – though I fear this will be another limited release.

If you do miss out on this set however, I can’t imagine the seperate kits being too far away, and while you will get great value on this box, those individual sets will still be a lot cheaper than the old resin ones.

Battle Group boxes are something that we are seeing more and more of in this edition of Heresy, and I hope they continue, it gives players a way of adding a collection of brand new models at a reduced price, and they often make up the bulk of models that you need when constructing an army.

Heresy used to have a very large barrier to entry, but with all these new plastic kits getting released things are starting to get easier than they ever have been

The Mechanicum Battle Group is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 17th August

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

View all posts by Matt Crowther