Zombicide Season II Prison Outbreak Zombie Review

 

Today I’ve got my first post ready to join the “Zombtober” challenge posted by (ZOMTOBER Challenge!).  The rules are pretty simple in that you complete and display at least one zombie or apocalypse survivor every Sunday in October.  With thirty three bloggers participating the results should be interesting.  I don’t fly the flag of the ZBA (zombie bloggers association), but zombies are a big part of my building and painting these days so I thought I would give the challenge a shot.

This week, I’ve focused on the zombies from the second season of the Zombicide board game franchise.  The kickstarter delivery has been a bit fragmented and disorganized, so some backers received the entire first wave delivery a month ago, while others still haven’t received anything.  I’m somewhere in the middle.  Two weeks ago I received the two big ticket items with Zombicide: Toxic City Mall and Zombicide:  Prison Outbreak.  Hopefully the first wave of Kickstarter extras will ship in the next month or so.  In the meantime I’ve been having a great time rooting through the two boxes.

Prison Outbreak is a standalone game in its own right but it is backwards compatible with both the core Zombicide game and the Toxic City Mall supplement.  It has six new survivors and zombivors (zombie versions of the survivors), introduces “berserker” zombies and best of all, it includes almost 50 traditional zombies from the core game with all new sculpts.

 I’ve spent the week rebasing and painting up one of each of the unique sculpts for the traditional zombies in the Prison Outbreak box.   The original zombies from the first season of Zombicide were decent sculpts from the perspective of typical “board game” quality, but were a little short of traditional tabletop figures.  The arms were a bit thin and amorphous and the details (especially the male zombie faces) were quite soft and mushy.  From my perspective, the cost versus quality equation still came out as a good value, but they weren’t much to write home about.

Fast forward to this year and we get nine new sculpts that in most cases raise the bar on quality.

First up are the walkers.  In the Prison Outbreak box you get six copies of five unique sculpts of good old fashioned “shufflers”.   These models are much nicer than the first season.  The arms and legs have been sculpted thicker, which should help the large flex that the first season figures had.  Flex isn’t a problem if you are using the figures straight out of the box, but for painting, too much flex in the thin arms can lead to paint cracking and falling off.   Also, the new figures have much greater detail, especially in the faces.  For someone that paints in the style I do, using washes to gain definition, deeper cuts on the details is much appreciated.  Like the original figures, the hands may tend to look like webbed flippers, but I think that’s a function of the medium, which would not support well sculpted fingers. 

 

Next up are the two runner zombies and the only real stinker in the whole box.  The female runner on the left is in a very awkward pose and has the oddly oversized gorilla arms reaching out.  Worse, out of the box she comes with a large peg attaching her back leg to the base. 

Not a great figure in my opinion especially compared to her concept art (PO Runner Concept).  On the plus side at least we get a little diversity to the runner ranks now.  The male runner on the right looks nice, although why he’s pulling a superman and ripping off his shirt is a mystery to me.

 

Now we come to the “fatty” zombie.  She’s a big lady in curlers and a too small dress.  I think the figure is a little over the top, but I think it matches up ok with the first season fatty pretty well.  Nice detailing compared to some of the softer features of the original fatty as well.  Unfortunately I messed up on the basing.   I thought she would look good shambling over some rubble on the base, but I don’t think it came out as well as it could have.  At some point I think I’ll pull her off and rebase her.

 

The last figure is the Abomination Zombie.  In game terms, he’s a walking tank that can only be killed by rare weapons, and if he appears early in a game you end up spending most of the game running away until you search through the deck to find something powerful enough to take him down.  While this guy’s the same height as the original abomination, his “hulking out” pose with arms raised makes him look that much more intimidating.  All in all another good figure.

CONCLUSION

For single part board gaming figures these are good sculpts that I think exceed the quality of the originals.  I plan on mixing them up with the original set to give games of original Zombicide a greater variety.  Now it’s on to the survivors.