Top post, Brummie. You too Scurv. Although...
They started out doing fantasy. They first made a set of elves which in my opinion are fantastic. Very thin and lithe and most definitely not a human with pointy ears. They got an endless mantra of crap from gamers along the lines of 'they dont look like other peoples elves I hate them!"
So they reigned that level of creativity in sharpish
I like Mantic myself, and I'm interested in the development of KoW and the general fantasy side of things. Problem is I think most of their fantasy minis look a bit rubbish. My beef with the elves, for instance, isn't that they look different, but that they look awkward. They are thin - very, very thin - but I'd hesitate to agree that they look lithe. Gangly, I'd say. With all those stick-limbs and sharp joints (including pointy hips) sticking out, I imagine that when they run they flail and clatter like Sheriff Woody from Toy Story.
Metal infantry and cavalry are a bit samey and somehow 'blunt'. The bolt thrower looks like it came out of a kinder egg. The drakons are truly
dire. I don't have a much better opinion of the chunky, giant-flat-head, horizontal-necked dwarfs or the repurposed twilight kin with the atrocious assassin plonked down front and centre in the KoW book. Orcs and goblins are better but still have some (unintentionally) ugly models and bits. The new gangly-limbed, oddly-posed basilean humans coming out don't wow me, and I'm not in the least bit interested in tiger riders. The only Mantic KoW army I like the look of is undead, but I don't have much interest in collecting an undead army either.
Y'know what, I'm just going to come out with it and put a chunk of the blame on Bob Naismith. He might have a legendary status in this hobby and industry, based on 20-30 year old minis, but like some others he doesn't hold up today. I thought 'bleh' about his phoned-in 6mm sci-fi for Dark Realm Miniatures and Steel Crown Industries, and really didn't like most of his monsters and sculpting aspects in the recent announcement for Model Display Products. Same awful drakon heads on the MDP hydra. Too many laurels being sat on, IMO.
And one last thing about Mantic: given that their purview at the beginning was cheaper alternatives to GW, for Warhammer, and cheap plastic models for general fantasy army building and gaming, was it really in their interests to come up with relatively radical and different designs of the fantasy archetypes?
Ahem. Back to Deadzone...