I received this kit a few weeks back as part of the Warhammer Conquest partworks by Hachette to which I’m subscribed, and I’ve just gotten round to building it (I forgot to take pictures of the sprues before I got stuck in, but they’re easy enough to find through a simple Google search). Let’s see how it shapes up!
Sprues: The Crawler kit comes on two large sprues which, because it’s part of the Conquest series came in a dark green plastic to denote that it’s a Death Guard mini, but I gather that the ones purchased from Games Workshop themselves come in the standard issue dark grey. Aside from that, there’s no difference whatsoever that I can make out; it is supplied with all of the pieces necessary to fit it out with all weapons options. The individual pieces were all fairly clean and well cast, and the level of detail is great, but then you’d expect that from a kit which costs as much as this (£40 at full retail).
Assembly: The assembly was relatively quick and easy, with most of the parts being large and their placement pretty obvious. Mould line removal was fairly minimal, and only a pain when cleaning the tracks. The whole thing took maybe five hours to assemble, but that was at a leisurely pace with frequent breaks for snacks and to play with the dog. I’m sure if you were hard at it you could get the Crawler put together in half that time.
The only issue I had with building this guy was the mounting of the mortar onto the main chassis, which was a little tricky: I’d recommend that anybody else building one should put the two of these together before the glue on the mortar mountings has fully set, as letting the pieces dry beforehand might cause problems when trying to align the tabs to their slots.
Painting: I haven’t actually painted this beast up yet, but one issue I can see is the side armour plates and gun mountings. It may be best for those wanting optimum results to paint these parts as sub-assemblies, as affixing them limits access to the tracks and bogies. However, this doesn’t really bother me too much, as I’m not that good a painter anyway.
Summary: A really nice kit, the finished model certainly looks big enough and has a very Death Guard-y appearance. While I’m not sure that I would ever pay full retail for it, the discount from subscribing to Conquest makes this an excellent miniature for what I spent: a grand total of £15.98.