After the trials and tribulations of my run up to Masters around terrain, I had hoped to have a break from terrain for a while but then the Tau Tide Wall came out and I am now looking at that most challenging of hobby projects again (at least for me!)
After the issues I had with the Age of Sigmar kits I was dubious of how this would go… its always nice to be pleasantly surprised though!
You can imagine my surprise when I got the 2 boxes of Tau Tide Wall open to find the kits on sprue – unlike the chaos fort a few months back. Better still, the kit is obviously made in the UK (I never checked the boxes to confirm this) since the plastic its made from behaves exactly like any GW kit from the Tau range. The casts are clean with the clever injection points like most modern kits and only minimal mould lines on the major pieces.
I was surprised how many spare parts you got – the kit is really aimed at giving you plenty of flexibility. You get an end cap for the shield line as well as a corner section to link it with other wall pieces in each box as well as 2 sets of stairs for the little defence point (I only used one on each).
The build is fairly intuitive and despite me clipping out all the pieces with no regard to the numbers, it all went together just fine – twice! So easy was it that I forgot to get any pics of the sprues or partial assembly!
I will be adding some magnets to the end pieces to make the joins more stable but realistically, they are more a convenience than anything.
The other clever part of this kit is the way the blue shield section fits in.
As you can see – it literally just slide into the slots of the connector arms. No glue required at all – its pretty stable as is! Best of all, painting it will be easy since I can take that bit out and hit it with spray paint or an airbrush with no worry of the blue piece being ruined.
The detail across the kit is great with lots of little bits to tie it into the tau range – drone shapes, symbols, even the deck plating all gives you no way of misunderstanding who this terrain was made for. Like all modern GW terrain kits, it also has its rules included in the box which makes for a nice bonus if you don’t have the funds for the campaign book with the rules in it. Sure its only black and white but who cares really. Tau players should be using this instead of an Aegis in most cases (in my opinion at least!)
All in all – after how wrong GW got it with the Chaos Fort, this is so very right!
Check out the full range of Tau terrain at the GW website
After this – I might just have to pick up the other 2 kits from the range to complete the set!