ClearHorizon Miniatures is a relatively new minis company that specializes in making 15mm sci-fi pieces. They’ve currently got their Hell Diver infantry along with their Drop Pod and are taking pre-orders for their VTOL Drop Ships. The minis are compatible with the Gruntz! System. ClearHorizon sent me a couple Hell Diver squads and a Drop Pod to check out.
So grab your plasma rifle and take a seat, it’s time for another TGN Review.
Confession time for me: I’ve never really paid much attention to 15mm miniatures. Having started playing minis games with 40k and then moving on to click games and through Warmachine and so forth, I only knew 15mm figures in passing. They existed, but beyond that, I didn’t know a thing about them. So these Hell Diver minis are the first 15mm models I’ve ever taken a real deep look at. So I can’t really say “compared to all the other 15mm minis I’ve seen” in this review.
But what I can say is that I’m rather impressed with these minis and if I’d known 15mm miniatures were like this the whole time, I might’ve looked more into them before. My first impression was, “wow… these are small.” Obviously that goes without saying that they’re small. But knowing actually how small was something. Since I was used to 28mm minis, I had a mental idea that these were going to be “half as big” but they’re not even really that big. I assume they’re in scale with other 15mm minis, but as I’ve mentioned several times already, I don’t have any personal experience to go on or figures from my personal collection to compare to.
Let’s start with the Hell Divers. I was surprised by the amount of detail that could be put on these two-piece (body and then backpack) minis. You can actually see individual armor plates and little bits of detail on the guns and helmets. The poses stand out from one-another and each one is unique so you feel like you’ve got a full squad of guys. The necks do seem a touch long, though.
The models came in perfect condition. Only one gun barrel was a little bent, but putting it back was easy.
Then I moved on to the Drop Pod. The model is made out of resin and had some flash to clean off, mostly in the form of little “halos” around the parts where the resin had seeped between the two mold halves. This thing has lots of pieces to it, and again, being 15mm, many of the pieces were smaller than flash I’ve cut off of other resin minis. There are 18 total pieces. Most of them are the pistons that would open and close the doors and extend the landing gear.
Assembly was easy and not all at the same time. Being resin, it took to glue rather readily, as the resin has that very slight texture to it. So that was nice. The only problem came with those pistons. There were holes for where the parts were supposed to have posts slide in on the sides of the doors, but none of them were large enough for the posts. Shaving them down didn’t seem like an option at all, so I just cut them off. After that, they all fit.
The only other problem were the pistons that go down to the landing pads. Those were just hard to get to. I heavily recommend needle-nose pliers or tweezers to get those into place. The first one I was sure I would ruin with how I managed to get glue on my thumb while trying to maneuver the part into place.
But in the end, it was worth it. You can see from the photos that this thing has detail to spare. All across the top, the sides and even a bit on the bottom there are details that, with a little paint, will really stand out.
Overall, I was rather impressed by the pieces. I can’t say it’s swayed me to only wanting to play 15mm games, but it’s given me a new bit of respect for these littler little mans.