The Crux Terminatus is a stone icon fitted onto Terminator Armour and said to contain a fragment of The Emperor of Mankind’s armour following his battle against Horus on the Vengeful Spirit. It’s also the name of a brand new Battleforce Box, up for pre order today, that is jam packed with Terminators including the brand new Assault Terminators and Terminator Ancient.

In this full review and unboxing we’ll be checking out the new set, taking a look at the value and building and painting the new kits!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over the Crux Terminatus box a little ahead of release to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your Crux Terminatus box from our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full video unboxing and review of the new set which you can see just below or over on YouTube

For Space Marine fans we have also checked out the new Ultramarines releases, which you can check out right here on the site!

So without further ado lets check out the new Terminator box!

Crux Terminatus Battleforce Box Review

So first things first, what’s in the box and how much does it cost? Well it clocks in at £155 and contains a set of Terminators (£40), 2 brand new Assault Terminator Sprues (£80 based on two terminator kits), a Terminator Captain (£29), a Terminator Chaplain (£29) and a new Terminator Ancient (assuming £29 based on the other two characters) – this is a total of £207 value or a saving of around £52- basically getting you a box of terminators and half a character free!

This is really good value, especially if you don’t already have all of the characters. It’s a really nice box thematically too – I’d be tempted to add another box of Terminators in order to be able to field a unit with each weapon loadout! There’s 765 points worth of Space Marines here, giving you a good chunk of a full army! This could be the foundation of an ace first company themed army, and that’s probably the direction I’ll be going in myself here.

So what are the models like?

Starting with the existing models, we get both characters and a full squad of Terminators. These are the full multi part box and not just the push fit models found in Leviathan, so you have all the options here to assemble them with whichever load out you want. They are a couple of years old now, but still cracking models

The new Assault Marines are an amazing kit! You get both loadouts, either Lightning Claws or Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield – Getting two sprues in the box I opted to build one unit of each to see what they both look like. Like with the recent Terminators, they are much larger than the old assault termies, looking much more impressive next to Primaris Marines. They are also really dynamic with a nice range of poses. I built them to follow what was in the instructions, but you can actually use any set of arms with any body making for more poses if you have a lot of them in your army (which you will with this box!)

Both of the loadouts look really good, with the Hammers and Shields looking really dynamic. The instructions recommend keeping the shields off the models in order to make painting them easier, but I actually found it wasn’t actually difficult to get my brush into detail with the shield in place – which certainly works when trying to knock out the entire box in a week! If I was to spend a little longer painting these I’d probably leave the shields separate and attach them later though – whichever works best for your painting style

The real star of the show however is the brand new Terminator Ancient. Marines with banners are cool – make it a Terminator with a banner and that’s even cooler, and this guy looks suitably impressive when painted up! The banner has sculpted detail but does have a couple of flat areas where you can pop transfers, which makes this usable for all chapters without having to worry about molded detail that doesnt work for your chapter.

Speaking of transfers, the sheet in the box is amazing It actually covers a number of Chapters that have gotten love recently – Imperial Fists, Ultramarines, Salamanders, White Scars and Raven Guard. This does make me wonder if these chapters will be getting some more love from a rules point of view going forward. I’d love picking your Chapter in a vanilla Space Marine army to have more impact than it does at the moment, perhaps with some abilities and rules not linked to detachments based on which you have picked.

I also painted up the new Ultramarines releases up for pre order this weekend, and I feel this box combined with those makes a great small elite army that can easily be expanded out further with the upcoming Space Marine Christmas Battleforce set – very 1st Company themed and would look great together on the battlefield!

The Crux Terminatus box is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 8th November

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with an early copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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