Kill Team: Into The Dark
Scenery To Tell A Story
The scenery provided with Kill Team: Into The Dark is quite simply fantastic, and easily my favourite scenery from GW so far. It not only fits the bill for Kill Team, with this current year’s releases being set in the Gallowdark Space Hulk, but it also suits something like Necromunda. The tight, claustrophobic atmosphere it creates is perfect for Zone Mortalis scenery, and Warhammer 40K scenery has a pretty consistent style, so it wouldn’t look out of place alongside the scenery already in Necromunda, or even the kits in previous Kill Team boxes, except perhaps the Ork scenery of Octarius.
Probably the best thing about the scenery is that there is interactivity within it. The doors within the bulkheads are able to be opened and closed, which is a very nice feature, particularly when coming from other GW kits where the doors are either open or closed, depending on whether you’ve cut them out and glued them or not. Inside of the game, you have actions for opening and closing the doors, which creates either shooting lines or protection. It also means you have to position your team properly in order to breach a room with your opponents in, or get to cover if they are stacking up, ready to swing the door open and unleash a hail of Bolter and Las-fire.
The scenery easily clips together into half-corner pieces, which also clip together, and are held in place with square caps. There are steel girders that cross overhead, and barricade pieces which are these same girders and pipes which have collapsed. The kit also comes with stacks of Imperial crates, emblazoned with the Aquilla, along with some assorted groups of gear, and some larger generators, adding to your barricades. In the box, as there is also a template sprue (available separately, or in the core boxes), so you also get some of the barricades that look like they are placed out and extended to provide cover, but be easier to deploy and move.
This kit isn’t just one that you’d buy and not be able to expand on until the next Kill Team box comes out (the next 3 quarterly releases are going to be following the storyline of the Space Hulk, building more modular scenery to create a truly awe inspiring board set on the derelict conglomeration of ships and space junk that is the Space Hulk, and in our case, the Gallowdark Space Hulk. If you have the Thermic Plasma Conduits, they line up with the large circular vent sections on some of the walls, allowing you to add even more cover, and even adding more danger, thanks to the Advanced Terrain Rules in White Dwarf issue #478, where the exposed Plasma coils gain the Dangerous trait.
Building the kit is simple, and painting it is just as easy, however, some tips for you if you’re still to get yours on the paint table, mask off the arms of the walls, as they are a snug fit as it is, and paint will get into the slots the walls fit in to, so the area can easily become a nightmare later down the line. I’d also suggest masking off the tops of the connecting walls. The square caps are a pain, even with just an undercoat on them. I ended up filing them down a little to allow the caps to slip on and off easier, but not enough that they easily come off by accident. In future kits, I’ll be making sure to do this. You don’t see those areas anyway because of the caps, so why bother? But these are the only bits to watch out for. The doors are easy to deal with, so long as you are fairly neat with your glue, and that whole area is simple to paint without worrying about clogging it all up.
A Rumbleslam team with a Christmas theme? Let’s make one!