Hunting the Hunters: TWD

The Hunters, Rosita, and Eugene are my first foray into Mantic's 5th wave of TWD: All Out War.  The sculpts continue to impress me, and seem to get just a little bit better with each subsequent release.  I intended to have all of these figures along with a Wave 4 Tyreese completed by the end of November but I ended up blowing the deadline.  What a surprise.  I got distracted by other shiny models and diverted by some terrain elements but progress is progress and plans have to be flexible.  Sometimes things jump the queue but it's better than doing nothing hobby related at all.

Truthfully I was happy I missed the mark.  Getting models painted is well and good but I'm always willing to step away from a project to either freshen up my perspective or recharge the batteries if I find my interest flagging.  Sometimes a quickly finished project suffers a bit on the creative end as a consequence  of pushing through and taking that little bit of extra time paid off.  I was working on a super secret project that I'm preparing for next year that involved painting camouflage and on returning to the hunters I took a page from the diversion and decided to deck out the hunters in same.  In the other project I am painting a standard pattern across a number of figures but for the hunters I did a quick series of one offs.  I wanted their camo to look like it might have come off the rack from Cabelas or a Wal-mart.  I Googled some civvie hunting patterns and applied them to four of the the models.  The two figures above are a sneaky type and a heavy.  The latter reminded me of Rutger Hauer when he was younger so I ended up painting him in that direction.

 The figure on the right is the exception to the camo scheme.  I didn't think a camo shirt would work.  I thought he would look too militaristic and went with a rustic styled plaid.  He still matches up with his friends because the colours in his clothing are consistent with the rest of the group.

I like this hunter quite a bit.  Between the flow of his pants and the way he is bringing his rifle to bear it made for a dynamic pose that caught my eye.  Opposite him is Tyreese.  Speaking of action I think this is fantastic.  Most of the figures in body armour look very restricted but Tyreese looks highly mobile; Almost fluid.  The character was a pro football (American)  player prior to the apocalypse being suited up like this might have felt like a return to game day for him.  This version of Tyreese is a Runner which is a departure from the Bruiser class of the last version.  It makes him an interesting choice that may require some finesse to use correctly.  I see him as a destroyer.  Tyreese moves fast and can deliver some solid punishment in melee.  The problem is that he is quite expensive and doesn't have the inherent damage soaking abilities of melee specialists like the Governor and Negan.  I could see using his speed to hunt and punk minor opposing characters quickly.  By overwhelming softer targets I think he could balance the books in the favor of his group prior to ganging up on the real close combat monsters.

Eugene oozes character.  He isn't in a dynamic pose but the clenched up demeanor captures his cowardly and awkward nature perfectly.  The face is awesome.  I'm not sure I'm done though.  I decided to paint him pasty to further contrast Rosita but I was tempted to add more red tints to give him a flushed appearance.  Rosita is a good figure but I don't feel I did it justice.  I should have worked from my Vallejo set when I painted her but to my detriment worked with a Reaper olives triad that didn't end particularly well.  I ended up adding some dilute tan over the layers I built up and reached a point in my corrections that I was running the risk of, "manning" her up.  I'm not dure if I bent of completely broke the rule of womens' complexions but simple is almost always better and this quickly became too complicated.  If I try to fix this I'm afraid I will have to strip the model completely and start over.

So why Hunting the Hunters as a title?  For the most part this article is exposition for sharing some painted models.  With the full group of Hunters complete, and with three notable survivors from Rick's group completed around time a, "versus" title card seemed the way to go.  I'm not much of a gamer but if I can see a harbinger of things to come in the meta maybe it's worth commenting on.  Compared to Ricks vets the hunters aren't much weighing in between 18 and 45 points each across the 5 models.  What's noteworthy is the number of synergies that exist between the members in this faction.  The Hunters compliment, make each other stronger with some cunning stacking that could present a serious threat if well played.  The difference that strikes me is the cohesion of the skills.  It's expected that some survivors have special dynamics but they are limited; Usually built around familial associations or love interests.  The hunters benefit from a broader interpretation  making for group wide shenanigans.  As TWD moves forward into more skirmish driven play I think this will become more common as new or updated survivors are introduced.