Anvil Industry has announced that they are finally working on designs for their “Not-Spacemarines” line of miniatures, their Exo-Lord range. Exo-Lords are clearly modeled after Games-Workshop’s Space Marine line of miniatures, but are made just different enough to not result in lawsuit over copyright infringement. The only problem with the Exo-Lord line, in my opinion, is that their helmet aesthetics were always incredibly lacking. Exo-Lord armor was cool enough, and their weapons are designed to look more realistic than Warhammer 40,000 weaponry.
Source: @SpikedGaming
Around late 2017 Anvil Industry announced that they were going to discontinue their Exo-Lord line of miniatures while the ranged received slight redesigns. The website put most old Exo-Lord variants up for sale at a slight discount, while at the same time informing customers that most Exo-Lord accessories would remain for sale, despite there being no Exo-Lord units to use those weapons. Despite having less aesthetic helmets, the overall design of Anvil Industry’s miniatures was close enough to Space Marines that kitbashing marines with Exo-Lord bits would result in units which did not look too out of place in the grim dark setting of Warhammer 40k. I personally preferred Exo-Lord torsos to Space Marine torsos when it came to creating tactical marine squads, as they tend to look more tactical.
Exo-Lord Redesign Source: @AnvilIndustry
On July 11th in an Instagram post, Anvil Industry gave us a preview of its new Exo-Lord design. The torso design for the new Exo-Lords gives the units a sturdy feel to them. The Torso armor has this plate armor feel to it which makes it feel bulky, but mobile, with the ability to take a beating while not slowing down its wearer. The pauldrons on these models leaves a lot to be desired as there is not much change from the original Exo-Lord shoulders, and frankly they feel mismatched to the new torso. The shoulder issue can easily be fixed by replacing them with Citadel shoulder pads, but the real issue I have with this sculpt is the legs. Those legs are boxy as all hell, and the front of the legs are way too plain. It looks like not much design went into the legs, however this is remedied by the fact that you can simply replace them with the bionic replacement legs also sold by Anvil Industry.
Overall this new design has a lot of promise, specially if they fix the appearance of the legs. Anvil Industry has stated that these models are slightly bigger than the original Exo-Lords meaning these may be a response to Primaris Marines. Stay tuned to see future variants to the Exo-Lord line, I for one hope for a stealth themed sculpt.
