Dropzone Commander, produced by Hawk Wargames, has been around for a while. The game is in an odd little scale – 10mm – that’s not particularly popular (6mm and 15mm on either side are quite popular). This game has created quite a bit of debate: it’s not cheap, it looks spectacular and is not the only 10mm sci-fi game to come out recently (Spartan Games’ Planetfall). I’d been on the fence about this game: the first and second points had me in a push-pull that combined with no local interest had me doing other things.

In a pretty cleaver move, Hawk Wargames released a 2-player starter that for about $110 AUD that gives you everything required to play: miniatures (2x starter armies), rules, cardboard scenery, tokens, dice, etc. I’m not going to look at the entire box contents – save to say there’s plenty in there. What I’m most interested in are the miniatures so I’ll focus on them.

First things first: these are not the same as the original starter set miniatures. The DzC miniatures are cast mostly in resin with the infantry done in white metal. The starter set miniatures are plastic and they’ve been quite cleaver. Each side is made up from 3 identical sprues. Each sprue has a medium dropship, main battle tank, anti-air tank, armoured personnel carrier and 2x stands of infantry. Put the three of these together and you have the same force as the original starter with a bonus APC.

Now the big risk with doing something like this is that you can end up with a drop in quality. If these aren’t as good as the originals then I don’t think anyone should mind, because these are pretty impressive. I assembled one of each ground unit and put them up in front of the new camera rig. This has recently been upgraded with a new body (which I’m still learning) so the quality of the pictures improves a little as we go through. One thing to bear in mind with these is that they are all at the same scale and the biggest of these (the bear APC) comes in at about 48mm (less than 2″) long.

The 2 dropships are a lot bigger – I’ve halved the resolution for these, but as you can still see these are impressively detailed models.