Marvel Crisis Protocol – Earth’s Mightiest Core Set Terrain

We showed you in the unboxing the content of Earth's Mightiest core set, and a second article covering for the characters for Marvel Crisis Protocol. In todays third and final part of the reviews on the core set, we will take a closer look upon the terrain.

As you can see from the overview on the box, there is quite a bit of terrain in there. And the stack of sprues, is satisfying to look at as well.

The casting crisp and clean. It is interesting to see, that they went for multi-part moulds, with partial slide-ins parts of the moulds, so they would be able to deal with undercuts (injection moulds are usually two-parts milled from metal and to be able to release the sprue, they can't cover undercuts in the design, as these pieces would stay stuck).

So in addition to the two sprues covering the characters, we have this pile to build for terrain.

Let us begin with the gas station, which is build from these two sprues, and includes a pump as well as damaged car. You will notice the number beneath the roof of the gas station, this is the size class, in this case 4. This is relevant information for the players to see, if their character can for example demolish this building and what kind of damage is dealt.

So let us start building these. I snipped the pieces from the sprue, gave them a quick clean by removing the mould lines and sanding down the areas, where they were connected to the sprue. This went quickly and even the larger pieces didn't have any problem with warpage.

The first piece we are going to complete is the totaled car. There are is a ultron bot scattered over it. So this is what we're going to assembly as well and then glue on top of the car.

Similar is the build for the building rubble, that is added towards the gas station. There are two ultron bots fighting their way out of the rocks and remains of the building.

The building comes with two different signs on the sprue, and as all the gas station specific pieces are on a sprue of their own, this gives the option to be used in other circumstances, for example with the Crashed Sentinel Terrain Pack. The roof took a bit of pressure to properly align with the sides. But nothing that glue and a firm press couldn't fix.

This is already a nice corner with terrain and as you can see with the miniatures, provides a bit of coverage as well as means of interaction.

Next up the cars. There are two hatch backs in this kit, and you can see from the underside, that these cars count as size 2.

Rapidly build, two parts for the main body of the vehicle. You add the four wheels, two side mirriors and optional is the taxi sign on top. These aren't that big, but as true line of sight doesn't matter with Marvel Crisis Protocol, this isn't an issue.

There are even two skid loaders in this set. With quite the amount of individual pieces.

I was hoping with these, that I could change the position of the excavator bucket a bit, maybe lift it. But this is fixed and you have doubles. You can tackle that with a paint job, but it isn't unusual for a building site, to have multiple skid loaders and other equipment. That's more of an aesthetic issue.

And now we move on to the smaller scatter. There are some barriers, barrels and trash containers in there as well. The usual items that get thrown around in comic book action.

There are a total of 6 barriers in there. Two pieces per barrier, rapidly build and no issues regarding the fit.

In case of the trash containers did I swap the logo to the back on one of them, and you can see on the underside the size class 2 of the item.

And six barrels, that are pretty much build like any barrels you can grab from a model kit. No hassle, easy fit and you can basically never have enough of them.

The last bit of scatter terrain are these lamp posts and signals.

Again, quickly build and make sense with the setting. You can put them on street corners or crossings. With size 1 pretty much everyone can grab them. And what would a City like New York be, without street lights.

And the entire yield from that set is quite the terrain collection. Especially for a starter set, this is very solid and more than I expected. Depending on where you want to go terrain wise, adding NYC Terrain Expansion or Construction Site at 50 EUR each, would be a great addition to this.

As we pointed out in the article on the characters, the scale is about 1:43, which means you can browse through a lot of die-cast vehicles and to a certain degree use terrain from other tabletop ranges as well. The car on the right is from the Walking Dead Scenery booster. You can see it is a bit smaller, especially as the S-Class should be much bigger than a hatchback, but you can make it work and again, as you don't use true-line-of-sight, it would be size 2 and that is that.

Conclusion

After part three of our review, I am still very pleased with this core set. The characters already provide you with more product than the retail of the core set is, and the terrain in here is easily two terrain packs about 50 EURs each, adding another 100 EUR RRP to that. And to be honest, I didn't expect that much content, especially on the terrain part, from a core set. Many other systems cheap out there and give you card board cut outs or something as a proxy until you buy more. But these are the proper items from the extended range. The old core set covers "only" about half of the NYC Terrain expansion, so money would be better spend on the terrain pack instead of an old core set, unless you wan to have the older sculpts or alternate heroes.

Quality on the terrain is good. We had no (bigger) issues with warpage or fit, the individual pieces were assembled quickly and removing the few mould lines was done in without much effort as well. The amount of detail on these terrain pieces is more than sufficient, but still on a level that it doesn't overload newcomers to the hobby. Most thing will be fine with base colour, a wash and a drybrush highlight.

Some of the buildings and items from this range, will work for modern combat systems as well, and the other way around. Just make sure to check the scale, as 28mm might look odd for the 40+mm size miniatures.

Marvel Crisis Protocol is a game by Atomic Mass Games and distributed by Asmodee.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.