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Behold the Glory of the KV128 Stormsurge & Review

2 Minute Read
Oct 4 2015
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stormsurge-glory

Submit to The Great Good! The Tau Stormsurge is here to blow you away when you see it in the round! – and what a “mini” it is!

via Games Workshop

https://youtu.be/D2HbIDHBn3U

Kit Review

Well, love it or leave it, the Tau are finally getting a very distinctive aesthetic for thier suits.  What I think the Stormsurge shows is that GW is willing to experiment a bit.  I’ve always felt the design of the Tau tanks and skimmers was more cohesive and distinctive than their suits of all types.  The Crisis Suits have always had a type of “cheap anime knock off” feel to them, kind of like wanting to get Transformers for christmas and getting Go-bots instead.  Forgeworld made some good strides towards suit designs as far back as the Taros Campaign book, but it took the arrival of the Riptide and now to Stormsurge to really give the Tau suit lineup a sense of direction.

The Stormsurge is certainly a new way of thinking – with no arms, and an exposed cockpit.  It possesses that “ungainlyness” and oversized rounded forms of  the ground vehicles and it helps tie the entire range together.  These are meant to be hulking plodding vehicles that hunker down, deploy (the kind of silly and undersized) support struts and blast away, as opposed to the hand to hand combat cababilities the other suits are expected to perform. I think the design matches that goal.

battletech-catapult

Battletech Catapult – Hmmm…

I hope to see the Tau suits continue to expand in unexpected directions, like you see in the range of Battletech Battlemechs.  I expect to see some great modeling poses out there, with all the ball and socket joints on the kit.I really like this model in the round. If anything, the side and back are just as dripping with interesting shape and details as the front.

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It’s a somewhat divisive model, but that may actually be a plus for the Tau line that could use some fresh blood pumped into it.

4 out of 5 stars ( -1 Star for the $150 pricepoint)

Are you more impressed by the design of the Stormsurge or the Riptide?

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Author: Larry Vela
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