Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels Sanguinary Guard review

The Sanguinary Guard are the elite of replica watches uk elite of the Blood Angels.

They enter battle wearing ornate suits of artificer armour and are armed with wrist mounted Angelus boltguns that leave their hands free to wield lethal two handed power glaives.

First impressions

I must say that when I saw the first pics of the Sanguinary Guard online I wasn’t that keen on them. That said I think I can put some of these feelings down the fact the death masks freak me out, I think I must has been scared witless by something similar as a kid (was there a Dr Who with guys wearing masks like these?), anyway…

These feelings fell by the wayside once I got my hands on the kit. The sculpts are incredibly detailed and the sheer number of options on the sprue is impressive to say the least.

All in all a good start and time to get stuck in (making sure not to look too closely at the death masks).

The pro’s

Just by taking a look at the sprues you can immediately see that this kit is very ornate, as befits a squad of elite marines in Artificer Armour. Games Workshop have really gone to town here, the torsos legs, shoulder pads and heads are all incredibly detailed, this attention to detail even extends to the soles of the models feet…

Sprue 1 – Sprue 2

The sprues include all the weapons options available to the Sanguinary Guard in the new Codex, there are enough Angelus Boltguns for the whole squad along with 1 Inferno Pistol, 1 Plasma Pistol & 1 Power Fist.

Also included is a Chapter Banner & enough Death Mask heads for the whole squad, essentially covering all the possible unit upgrades  offered by the Codex.

On to the number of customisation options. There are a total of 15 heads in this box, that’s 3 for each model, granted this is partially to allow for the use of death masks but it’s still an impressive tally. There are also a few more shoulder pads in the kit than you actually need, in this case there are 15 when only 10 are needed, these will be great for adding detail to your Blood Angel Honour Guard.

Finally, a minor point, all the extra detail could theoretically make it trickier to remove mould lines but I never found this when working with the kit. Whether this was happy coincidence or clever sprue layout, it made preparing the parts very easy.

The Con’s

So far so good, however I’m afraid I do have some pretty major issues with this kit.

Firstly, Sanguinary Guard need to be ornate but the degree to which this has been taken means that some parts are so “sticky-outy” that they get in the way of each other. This effectively removes many of the build options you thought you had as only certain combinations of parts actually fit together.

One of the main offenders here are shoulder pads. They often get in the way of the wings, limiting positioning options. You also can’t build a marine facing left or right with some shoulder pads as they would obscure the marines view, meaning some shoulder pads can’t be used on some weapon arms if you wish to make the marine look like he is taking aim with that weapon.

This might not sound like a big deal but when you’re tearing off the shoulder pads of a model for the 3rd time as they clash with a part you add later you’ll see where I’m coming from.

The only solution here is to plan ahead, I would suggest building the whole unit without shoulder pads or wings and then try out which shoulder pad combination is going to work for you. Alternatively you can go all out and build each model using blu-tac or similar to test that your chosen configuration will work. One final word of warning, try to build the whole unit together as you may find yourself at the end of the build with a load of parts that simply won’t go together at all, without a little conversion work anyway.

The second major gripe is that the wings are really not very easy to attach to these models. They are quite heavy and the area of contact with the body is very small. This means that you need to hold the parts for a long time to ensure they maintain the desired position while the glue sets. I found it took about 1 minute of holding by hand followed by a good 20 minutes leaving the model in a position that would reduce movement to ensure the desired wing position was maintained.

All in all a couple of very annoying issues.

Summary

Without the con’s we’d be looking at an 8 out of 10 here, this really is a nice looking kit and there are some great aspects to these models, great detail and loads of spare parts. However they are just so frustrating to build that I can’t bring myself to rate this kit any higher than a….

Overall score: 6/10