A brand new army comes to Warhammer The Horus Heresy today in the form of the Skitarii Battle Group containing the brand new Skitarii Battle-Pilgryms. Able to be taken as a stand alone army, or marching alongside the forces of the Mechanicum of Mars this is exciting time for Horus Heresy players!

In this full review and unboxing we’ll be checking out the new models, seeing how they go together and painting up the models to see what they look like in the flesh!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us this set a little early to review on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your Skitarii Battle Group from our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

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

Sadly we don’t have the new Journal Tactica yet, so we can’t talk about the rules side of things – but we’ll be revisiting this once we have the new book!

So without further ado, let’s check out the new box!

Skitarii Battle Group Review

It’s not every day we get brand new units added to Warhammer The Horus Heresy, let alone an entirely new sub-army – but the new Skitarii Battle-Pilgryms are finally here in the new Skitarii Battle Group box!

This is an exciting one because it’s got quite a lot of goodies in it – 16 Skitarii Battle-Pilgryms, a new Skitarii Battle-Pilgrym Marshal and the Vulturax Startos-Automata returning in plastic!

You get 2 frames building up the Vulturax, one for the Marshall and 4 sprues for the Skitarii that each build up 4 models. The box costs £85 which seems a decent price considering the old resin Vulturax was around £90. I suspect the Skitarii will be boxed 4 frames to a box at the same price point as 20 Marines (£54.50) – so I think there’s going to be some good savings to be had here, especially as you’ll probably want multiples of these.

The Vulturax is one of my favourite Horus Heresy units, and it’s great to finally see it in plastic. I was expecting to maybe see some variation in weapons this time around, but it’s still got the same loadout as last time. The design is very similar to the old one and went together like a dream! The model has quite a bit of movement on it’s flying stand – so it can be posed in some fun positions while still being removable for storage, which is a nice touch!

Next up in the Skitarii Battle Group set we have the new Marshal, a new hero for the Skitarii Battle-Pilgryms. Unfortunately I’ve not seen the rules for this guy yet, but the model comes with 3 different melee options and two different pistols, giving you lots of use for duplicates if you pick up multiples of this box. What’s really nice is that there’s a couple of different poses too, meaning you have lots of scope for having a few of these that all look different.

Next up are the Battle-Pilgryms themselves – these guys are so weird and alien looking with legs far too long compared to their bodies. I love this look, and they look especially sinister too compared to the 40k Skitarii

They are massive too, standing much taller than these Titan Guard I have here. They stand around as high as Thallax and look really intimidating next to other models, which is great! These guys have 2 wounds each, and it feels like they should do from the mass of them.

A couple of the models are a little fiddly to build with the arm positioning in particular, but I think this is due to the steps in the manual – if I was to build them again I’d probably ignore the instructions and put them together slightly differently just to maximise the contact points. Once I’d figured out the positioning though they are pretty quick to plow through. There’s only 4 different poses and a number of different heads, so like with the Space Marines you have limited poses here – but it still works as a unit of them, and there’s enough variation in the head posing to make them look different.

I fully expect we’ll get more from this range in the future, so I have high hopes for a melee variant and maybe some special weapon teams perhaps. Hopefully this is also a sign that the Dark Mechanicum are on the way at some point too!

For £85 this is a great box, and I’ll be picking up another one to get the foundations of a Skitarii army together!

We’ve also got another model up for pre order in the form of Lotara Sarrin, Shipmistress of the Conquerer! She’s been on my painting desk for around a year now, so it’s good to see her finally released! This was great fun to work on, and worked as a nice change of pace – I really hope that we see some other characters from the books like this released for the game, it’d be great to see someone like Malcador get a model maybe!

The Mechanicum Skitarii Battle Group box is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 31st January

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

Published by Matt Crowther

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