Another of my recent additions is a rather agitated hippo from Mierce Miniatures. I've been wanting to get one of their figures for some time, and happily they had this bellicose fellow in their clearance section. It ticked all the boxes: metals, skin, cloth, bone and textures. For an outfit that has as large a selection of miniatures as they do, it's not that easy to find reviews or photos for some reason. And they truly do have a stunning number of releases. The scale is nominally 75mm, but Hippos are large beasts so it stands 90mm+ high counting the fancy club. Once again, this is brought to you by me and my wallet and the opinions and observations are strictly my own.




I ordered direct from Mierce (thumbs up to their customer service), and the package arrived very quickly in a plain box with the parts in one bag and a simple 80mm base loose in the box. Do be mindful when dumping the contents out, there is a good chance some of the smaller parts will have broken off the sprues.




The quality of the casting is excellent in terms of overall detail, there is however a fair bit of flash. Fortunately it is of the ultra thin variety and should clean up nicely. Parts breakdown is pretty conventional, with the lower jaw and ears cast separately for better definition, a sensible approach.






The main casting is a rather substantial chunk of resin. The detail is really wonderful. Plenty of wrinkles, textures and so on. The necklace looks to be made from crocodile teeth or some other similar toothy adversary. Clearly not someone to be taken lightly. The pour gates on the bottoms of the feet are also fairly big, but should be relatively simple to remove with a saw. There are some mould seams on the inner legs, a little putty will be in order here.







The head is equally impressive with a wide gaping maw and excellent detail. The lower jaw completes the ferocious look and feel. Nasty chompers.










I'm not sure why the sculptor chose to have a spiky club with bells on it, but there you go. It does work visually, and the wood texture is really nice and will add some extra interest with a proper paint job.





There is some sort of contraption strapped to the back and looks to be made of tusks. I'm not quite sure what to make of it in terms of utility, but we do get more texture. Can't have too much texture.



All in all, this is a rather impressive piece. It is certainly imposing and it has more detail than you can shake a belled stick at. Normal retail is £39.99, shipping not included, which is a very fair price in my opinion. Luckily I got mine for considerably less and this is the best steal (it goes way beyond a deal) I've had in a long time. We'll have to wait and see how it all goes together and this is another one I'm really looking forward to painting sometime in the hopefully not too distant future.

Kimmo

Cheers Nap! Hopefully I'll see me painting this soon as well

Kimmo