Middara Resins Review (Patreon)

There should be no secret that resins are an inevitable part of the experience surrounding boutique games like the ones we engage with; Kingdom Death has them, Aeon Trespass has them and so does Middara.

I think it's no secret that the Middara miniatures in the game are not great; they have soft details,  and some of the characters are even lacking proper faces so you end up having to free hand that on. 

It has always been a LOT of work to get these soft PVC minis into any form or shape and has required a great deal of freehand texture work and rebuilding of features to have any form of success. I'm not very happy with any of the above, but it's been the best I can manage considering the base materials.

So I was cautious and concerned when it came to picking up these resin minis, but as Middara are moving into having a Kingdom Death style seasonal boutique store I felt that it was worth giving it a go and providing an honest breakdown of the experience and a review of the miniatures themselves.

Ordering was rather simple; I chose the 10 resin pack and a few additional boxes, including some duplicates to test. Here are the orders:

Now the important thing to note here is that is 17 boxes total; with Tomoe (Sankokushin woo!) Circe and the Coven Mother arriving in duplicate (I'm trying to work out if I can do a giveaway for these extra items, Patreon is very restrictive in what they allow). 

There was a whole bunch of delays at this point because Succubus Publishing didn't anticipate as many orders as they got and they ended up short on stock. I was not exactly thrilled with their communication on this either; I didn't get any direct warning or offer of alternative options - instead I was just shipped my core Middara game + playmats & sleeves without even an explanatory note in the box to explain where the rest was. It took a few emails to get to the bottom of this and while I am sympathetic about the situation - mine was not exactly a small order, I did expect to receive at least a minimal notice directly. 

They did talk about this problem in a few other places, the thing is; as someone who ordered and doesn't monitor every single place where they split out their correspondence - I found it difficult to understand why I had received only a part shipment.

Anyway, here's what actually arrived when the resins did finally arrive a few months later. There was no customs charge because Succubus Publishing have an EU warehouse - that at least is a massive plus.

The observant will have immediately clocked that this is 13 boxes; not the 17 listed above. So every duplicate (Tomoe, Coven, Circe) and Psyche was NOT shipped to me. I sorted out some duplicates in this manner because I wanted to test their ordering system and see if they could cope with the weird way in which this resulted in duplicates. And we can see that not only did the EU warehouse fail to ship my duplicates, but they couldn't even manage to ship Psyche.

This all happened around the time of Gen Con, so I've had a time with absolutely no response from Succubus Publishing (SP) - I understand that Gen Con is quite a busy time and a smaller team like SP is "all hands on deck", but the auto message they left provided an alternate email address for me to contact in respect to order problems. That's great; but that email address didn't respond at all. So I think we're beginning to see a pattern within the EU distribution - that warehouse seems to not be up to the task of shipping out orders on behalf of SP. It's great that they have an EU distributor, but I think they need to talk with the management there and get them to tighten up the ship.

All of that written, the direct support I received yesterday from SP themselves has been good, they themselves are responsive. They are shipping out the missing boxes, except for Psyche - there are none of those around (not impressed that they didn't keep some copies back to replace damaged/lost in transit/not delivered items) - but apart from that the service so far from the internal SP staff has been positive. They CC you in to their internal requests to the warehouses (who don't CC you into the responses, once again highlighting where the problem in my shipment seems to be) and as such I can at least say that I feel confident that SP will sort out any problems you have in a professional manner. There just might be additional wrinkles for EU customers because of the distributor.

So now let us take a look at what you get in a box. Here's Tomoe!

As a quick note; Francesco from Axis Mundi Games confirmed that Tomoe is not supposed to have cat/fox ears. They are not present on the miniature, but they are still on the art. Whoops.

The box is alright; the cardboard is quite thin, so I'd put it above the stinky awful brown boxes that come with most KD resins; but behind the white boxes - I'm not one who'd keep any box once the miniature it came with is assembled, but these boxes are pretty.

The back shows everything you can expect to receive in the box plus a render of the miniature. A big step up over competitors because you can check all the inventory against the box and you also get a bit of info on how the miniature should be assembled. We'll talk a bit more about assembly later.

The box is sealed with a single plastic sticker (I approve of not shrink wrapping these) and it opens up like so.

Contents come out; I haven't had any damaged in the transit and I'm pretty happy with the interior packaging.

One weird quirk of these is the plastic sleeve that holds the art + character cards is tight. Like really tight. Like Scrooge McDuck money bin tight. This is how I had to get the cards out every single time:

The bending did not damage the cards and they straightened out just fine, but you will have to either bend or cut the plastic to free these things. I have no idea how they got these cards into the plastic in the first place.

All of these sets come with components that allow you to use the character either as a summon or as a character in the Crawl mode or sometimes as an alternative enemy (or sometimes all of those!) There are also sometimes extra skills and items which you can add into your general pool of things you can get during either the story mode or the crawls. Tomoe here can only be used as an alternative adventurer during the crawl mode. 

Onto the model itself:

So yeah, she's pretty well protected, all of the miniatures are. I gather from reading that the earlier batches had less protection and things broke in the post. Steps have been taken to avoid that happening any further.

Here is everything from the bag.

In all cases the resin gating is pretty well done and details are not too obscured, but I have seen older models where the gating runs across important details and ruins the casts. I think they may have changed the molds since then.

The bow and arrow arm are very interesting as they are constructed from a different material to the rest. SP make the choice to change certain small pieces for a different resin or even metal depending on the parts. It's been a god send when assembling these models because certain things are just awful when they're pure resin (ribbons for example).

Now I'm afraid I haven't gotten around to assembling Tomoe yet because I'm not painting these models at this time (due to a need to finish the next batch in my final KDM commission) but I did assemble the core four adventurers (Remi, Zeke, Rook and Nightingale) to get an idea of what they look like. 

This is where the other issue cropped up; out of all the minis I received, Remi's was damaged through the casting process, bubbles had been allowed to form while she set and as such she has multiple points of damage. 

She's riddled with these bubbles and very fragile as a consequence. SP are sending me a replacement, the process of getting it was painless and I had no defects in any of the other models I ordered. (But be aware others have reported casting defects - they get replacements without hassle, but the failure rate is higher than KD, ITUS and AMG's lines).

When they arrive, and they are not damaged however, these models are pretty stunning. I straight up prefer them over the ones that come from APG's Kingdom Death line because they have more character and life. Too many of APG's items look like blow up dolls which is a fault of the art director not the sculptors. SP's resin minis are more characterful and fun - which gives me hope for the Act II's sculpts - because the artists and direction are up to the task. It was just the material casters who let the side down.

Here's the original four in their Casual resin versions.

(Poor Remi, she looks OK from this angle, but she's not).

When I have time I will be replacing the PVC versions you saw at the start of this article with these ones because they are so much more dynamic, detailed and characterful than the others. I like how Rook towers over the others (his esper familiar is next to him on the right and is a part of the whole sculpt). If these are the future of the game's sculpting potential then we're going to see some amazing stuff.

As another example of how characterful and dynamic the sculpts are here is the Lupercalia Pack.

The sheer punk energy given off by these models is amazing - they feel chaotic and anarchistic in the same way that their art does and the low level of clothing doesn't feel gratuitous here - it's just their character.

One final warning; these models can be very complex to assemble. The Coven Mother is a single cast piece; but Faunus and the Judge's Daughter are amongst some of the most complex models I've assembled in recent times (and Circe is proving to be very challenging also). So watch out for that - honestly the boxes could do with a 'complexity rating' printed on each of them (and on the web store entry) because unlike the main game minis, these ones really do have a bite to them.

Summary

So, this has been a somewhat spotty experience with multiple issues and problems, a lot of which center around the EU distribution hub that seems to be a bit slap-dash with how they handle things. I reserve my final judgement until Psyche gets into my hands (and I'll drop out a bonus mini-update in the future when I paint some of these and when Psyche arrives. 

But overall; they actually got the product to me and provided good transparent communication about how they are dealing with issues - so I'd probably go again for another ride on this models and order some more next time they do a seasonal release because I greatly prefer the style and service I've received here than what I get from APG. There is absolutely room for improvement, but SP seem keen to sort out issues and are trying to take responsibility and be transparent. Which are all positives, they just need to tighten up quality control on the casting and give the EU warehouse a proper dressing down!

7/10 for now!

If you are interested I can also review the Aeon Trespass brand of resins, please let me know in the comments below! I've got some I already received and I'll straight up order a few more to provide an up to date experience.

And finally; as a reward for reading through this, look what I will be reviewing for you here next time. The newest Complex AI Boss Battling game in the genre, VagrantSong from Wyrd games!

Best of all, this game doesn't require any painting because they've gone with pretty acrylic standees.

The game itself is pretty great; there's an official TTS demo you can play over here; and you can read more about the game here, plus you can still pre-order it here and there is a small bonus for pre-ordering! I can give it a soft recommendation based on the little time I've had to play it so far, it is certainly unique and I think more child friendly than any other previous release (as long as you're OK with saving cartoon skeletons by returning their humanity!)