Cyberpunk RED Combat Zone Edgerunners 2
review by Alapai
Cyberpunk RED Combat Zone is a miniatures skirmish game taking place in the world of Cyberpunk RED, the 4th edition of the tabletop RPG set in 2045. In the game, you lead your gang into battle against other gangs to control parts of Night City. And like my other reviews this year, I got a pack of the miniatures for themselves and not for the game itself, which I have not played. This is a review of the Edgerunners 2 box and what can be applied from that to the rest of the miniatures as a whole.
The first thing I noticed when opening the box was that I didn’t have to do much work in assembly. For example, Shadowsun was made up of tons of smaller pieces that had to be assembled; even her drones were made up of 7 pieces and a base. Even the Fallout minis were made up of a minimum of 2 pieces. The Cyberpunk minis were mostly already assembled. Of the 6 minis in the box, only one had to be assembled and that was just attaching one character’s weapon and right arm to his body. Of note though, you aren’t able to glue them together with plastic glue; you have to use super glue. They do have a basic guide on how to assemble their minis on their website. As they are mostly already assembled, they also don’t have the most dynamic poses. One character is reaching into their jacket full of pistols and one is pointing a pistol, but otherwise the characters are pretty much just standing straight. Even with Unmatched, which is more a board game with miniatures than a miniatures game, of three characters from Hell’s Kitchen, two were in more dynamic poses than Cyberpunk’s minis. This isn’t the most damning thing, but I do generally prefer more dynamic poses than a character just standing up.
The next thing I noticed is that the figures all had pegs on the bottom of their feet for going into bases, but the bases didn’t have any slots for the pegs to go into. I did notice though that the bottoms of the base had an asymmetrical arrangement of holes on the bottom and after an amount of effort, realized that all of the characters’ pegs could fit into the holes on the bottoms of the bases. Because each character had a different width for their pegs, you had to figure out which of the two holes any given character fits into, but once you figured that out, you can move on to the next part which was more effort than other figures: drilling through the base. Using a hand drill, I was able to drill through the base through the holes for a given character, but then I used my Mouldline Remover to expand the hole to allow for the peg to fit into the hole. It was annoying to have to figure out, but once I got a hang of the procedure, it went pretty smoothly and I was able to get all of the characters’ pegs into the appropriate holes. While initially, they seemed pretty secure having their pegs glued in the holes, one of my figures did break off their pegs when painting and I had to glue him back on top of the pegs which was annoying.
As far as actually painting the minis, the plastic was somewhat soft and flexible which wasn’t ideal as putting a brush to the mini sometimes caused it to bend a little on the base. Additionally, while there wasn’t much to do for assembly, it probably is best to try and remove the mouldlines, something I didn’t think to do as I didn’t have to remove them from sprues. But there are still bits of plastic on the models that were more noticeable when I was trying to paint smaller features like one of the character’s faces.
The minis themselves did have a good amount of detail with lots of straps, armor parts and pouches that offer a lot to work with. While that does offer a lot of ways to make your characters unique, a lot of them are more intricate than I felt was necessary. For example, one of the characters has a bunch of studs on her jacket that were tiny bumps by the time she was primed and it was not worth it to me to try and paint them separately.
As far as a paint scheme, since these weren’t named characters from a franchise I know, I decided to do my own theme. I went for a blue/pink overall theme with each incorporating the theme differently into their outfits. One thing I did do as well was try to match some of their features up. For example, I mixed an off-white, bright yellow and grey together to make a color for blond hair. I then used that to paint two characters’ hair, not worrying about the rest of the bodies at the time. Similarly, I mixed a light blue with metallic medium to paint two characters’ guns and did those both before painting the rest of those characters.
One thing I also used was a lot of Turbo Dork paints, both the regular metallics and the Turboshift paints, in order to make the characters pretty shiny as I felt like shiny and Cyberpunk went hand in hand.
After finishing the models, I wanted to do something with the bases, so I tried to make some neon lines that ran over the bases. I started with a dark pink that I used to make a line. Then, I mixed that pink with a lighter pink to make a medium pink and made a slightly smaller medium pink line on top of the first dark pink line. Then, I took the lighter pink and added a smaller line on top of the medium pink line. I then placed an even thinner white line on top of the lighter pink. Finally, I topped it off with some fluorescent pink on top of the white. It’s not perfect, but I think the way it turned out wasn’t so bad.
Ultimately, I did enjoy my hobby time with the Cyberpunk minis. While assembly was very simple (in that only one of 6 had to be assembled), I liked the way they had the pegs and holes work although I would have liked to know I’d have to drill bases ahead of time. While the minis were a bit more flexible than I might prefer, each character was unique and did have a lot of detail that can make painting them an interesting experience and more challenging than painting an army of very similar characters.
If you are looking to paint some cyberpunk-inspired minis, Cyberpunk RED Combat Zone has a wide variety of different minis that are pretty affordable, with Starter Gangs being only $50 for 6 minis and other smaller boxes being even cheaper albeit for fewer minis. Just remember to have a drill and super glue ready as well as a way to remove mouldlines and you’re ready to go.
Cyberpunk RED Combat Zone minis and Edgerunners 2 specifically are available now from our webstore.
