Review: Urban War Bio Toxin Plant

Before I headed off to Melbourne for a week’s holiday I placed an order with Olympian Games in Canberra for a number of the excellent looking Urban War ‘Constructor Sets’.

These kits are manufactured by a Russian company called Tehnolog (yes that’s spelt correctly) and since seeing a review of the Platformer and Hexagon kits on Terrainosaur I’ve wanted to get my hands on some. Unfortunately the Tehnology web site is mostly in Russian and their reseller information is out of date!

Fortunately for English speakers the kits are sold under the ‘Urban War’ brand by Urban Mammoth UK for their game of the same name – which appears to be something of a Necromunda clone.

Unfortunately for me I live in Auckland, New Zealand and the size and cost of these kits made them too expensive to air freight from the UK.

Fortunately several Australian online stores now stock them! Aaron found that Olympian Games was the reseller with the most reasonable prices ($29AUS for a large kit) and they were also painless to deal with via email, replying promptly to my requests and handling our custom order to New Zealand (thanks to Dean of Olympia btw).

So now, almost a year after I first mentioned these kits I finally have some in my gaming garage ready to kit bash. As I mentioned Terrainosaur have reviewed the Platformer and Hexagon kits but I couldn’t find the newer Bio Toxin Plant reviewed anywhere so here’s my mini-review.

First Impression

The Bio Toxin Plant box is about the same size as a GW Regiment box, maybe a little wider and is covered in brightly rendered Urban War box art.

The front and back of the box display good examples of the sort of constructions you can make with the kit while the sides are mainly used for promotion of the Urban War game and related figures. The box was shrink wrapped and had a pleasing heft to it.

Upon opening I discovered it was entirely filled with the sprues you see in these photos. In fact the sprues were so closely packed that once I’d removed them all for examination I was unable to get them all back into the box! I was immediately filled with a happy feeling of good value for money.

Instructions

The box also included a large two-sided fold out sheet of clear and detailed assembly instructions with a wealth of photos. They identify the various bits and pieces and how they fit together which is good because the kit contains a lot of individual parts, some of which have less than obvious function.

The Sprues

In this kit you receive several copies of three unique sprues:

1. Four copies of one large sprue which is broken into three parts – see the first three photos above. This sprue builds the the tanks and piping and contains enough parts to build two large round silo like tanks and four smaller cylindrical tanks, as well as a considerable amount of interconnected piping.
2. Four copies of the flat sprue to the right which forms the plant walkways.
3. Two copies of the last sprue – see below – which builds into supporting pillars for the tanks, pipes and walkways.

All of the sprues are cast in a light metallic silver plastic that has a waxy feel to it. I’ve yet to assemble or paint anything but I’ll definitely give everything a good scrub in warm soapy water before I do as the pieces feel as if there’s mold release residue on them.

Glancing over the sprues I didn’t notice anything missing or mis-cast and every part looks to have a wealth of surface detail with rivetting, raised panels and struts giving it a suitably industrial feel. There are a lot of parts so I suspect cleaning and assembly will take quite some time, however I’ll cover than in a future post so stay tuned…