Kit Review: Anvil Industry - Heavy O.G.R.E Mech Suit

I'm a big fan of Anvil Industry and while I've not shared anything from them on this blog yet, I've followed them with great interest since they first started producing resin miniatures and components back in 2011 - I even had a few of the miniatures from their short lived Afterlife skirmish game in my collection for a while.

Although Afterlife unfortunately never really took off, Anvil offer a broad range of miniatures, including their fantastic Daughters of the Burning Rose range which was created through an incredibly successful Kickstarter in 2018. 

Anvil were commendably quick to capitalise on the rise in ownership of 3D printers and a lot of Anvil's new releases these days tend to be as digital files first with physical releases following some time afterwards and as they've now been in business for just over a decade, it's a model that's obviously helping by keeping their costs down while still enabling them to create a huge range of unique and characterful designs. As a case in point, the O.G.R.E. Mech Suits were originally only available as digital files, with the resin kit being released in January of this year.

The Kit

The OGRE kit is incredibly modular with Anvil offering options for different torsos (heavy armour and recon), arms (shooting and neutral), weapon loadouts (gauss cannon, chaingun and flamethrower) and legs (static, advancing and crouching), as well as a couple of extra options that can be mounted on the rear of the torso in the form of a jetpack and ammunition stowage. 

I chose to go with the heavy armoured torso, shooting arms, advancing legs and the chaingun armament as well as one each of the jetpack and stowage options so I have a wee look at them both. 

One other choice that I think is available on any order from Anvil is whether you would like bases with your models or not - in this case I opted not to get one as I've some 40mm, 50mm and 60mm ones in my hobby supply drawers so I could see which suited best as I built the kit - though Anvil do suggest that the OGRE is best suited to a 40mm or 50mm one on their website. 

The components are cast in a light coloured resin and come on several separate sprues as you can see below. The casting quality is fantastic and the components will require minimum clean up other than to remove the gates and supports.

Anvil recently released a multiple missile pod for the O.G.R.E as well, so I snapped one up to add to the suit. The pod comes in three separate pieces and attaches to the back of the Mechin the same way as the jump pack and stowage options meaning that you could magnetise them fairly easy and swap between the backpack options if you were so inclined.

Along with new ranged weapons, Anvil have also just released some melee options for the O.G.R.E as well which include a brutal looking shock maul, a suitably fearsome power blade, a pretty imposing Frag Pistol and a riot shield. 

The Build

Once everything was cleaned up, the build was delightfully easy and there's quite a lot of poseability in the kit. I'd recommend dryfitting the legs to get the angles right, and it'll be worth scoring the surfaces of the ball and socket joints in both the hips and shoulders to increase the surface area for gluing. 

One feature of the kit I was really impressed with was the way that the arms have been designed so that the weapons slot into the hands, so I think you could try and magentise them if you fancied the challenge, though I confess, I haven't magnetised this one (yet!).

The backpacks slot into place really easily, here's the jetpack variant. Nice as it looks, I think it may be better suited to the Recon variant of the suit:

and the ammunition storage one:

and finally the missile pod:

The missile pod adds some lovely additional bulk to the suit and I think its the option I'm most likely to keep on the miniature.

I think it's worth mentioning that if you wanted to, you could build the missile pod with the front cap closed if you're not keen on how it looks open.

The O.G.R.E is scaled to fit with Anvil's other 28mm 'heroic' scale miniatures and could work really perfectly for a number of game systems but could equally make a great display piece - you could even make a pretty cool diorama with one as you can leave the armoured carapace open to show the helmeted head of the pilot beneath, which is a separate component so you could swap ot out for another one if you wanted a different look.

If you fancy grabbing one (or more) of these fantastic miniatures yourself, you can pick them up from Anvil Industry here or if you prefer to print your models, the files are available to download in pre-supported format in the Sci-fi Drop Troopers bundle.

I plan to share the painted O.G.R.E on the blog at some point in the future, but in the meantime, thanks for reading.