ALL72015

Half-orcs - half orc, half man - seem to have much in common with their pure orc brethren. Certainly their taste in clothes, weapons and ornamentation seem hard to tell apart, so to us these figures seem much the same as the orcs. Their armour is quite extensive, as you might expect of anyone carrying a pike, and all have a mail hauberk underneath a breastplate, with more plate armour on the arms and legs. The helmets are very angular, and they have a transverse crest or plate across the crown. The pikes that they carry are all about 40 mm (2.88 metres) in length, and all have a sort of hook affair at the end rather than a pike head. The poses are basically four pairs of figures holding the pike at roughly the same angle, and they look good to us. No one holds the pike across the shoulder, but perhaps half-orcs don't do that.

The sculpting is very nice, with nice clean lines and smaller elements like the straps holding the plates being well done. The mail inevitably attempts to show the links, which is always a mistake at this scale, but otherwise we liked these figures, which are very evocative of the massed formations of pike seen in some of the Lord of the Rings films. There is not a lot of flash, so these are nice, although of course many more poses would have been better still. Since there are only eight figures to a sprue, and pike formations tend to be large and solid, we would have thought the maker could at least have included five sprues in the box rather than four.