I recently purchased a Tactical Squad box each of the Horus Heresy Tactical Marines. These come in either MkIII “Iron Armour” or MkVI “Corvus Armour.”

These plastic kits are newer but not new by now, so I appreciate a review is perhaps not necessary but after a conversation with a good friend this last week about the size comparison for certain things (Rhinos was this conversation – a topic I’ll come back to) it felt worth covering these whilst I could. I’ve been using these amongst the Chosen, Noise Marines and Legionaries of my Creations of Bile / Emperor’s Children Marines to really add that wonderful Long War feel!

Each Tactical Squad box is made up of 20 Marines. Because these are for the somewhat inflexible Legions of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy that followed, there’s not a huge amount of options for wargear. In each box, you get 4 of the Marine sprues comprising 5 marines each. You also get two of the command sprues.

This means you get 5 poses with 4 of each pose to make up the 20 Marines. You then get the 20 Bolters for your Tactical Marines. With two Command Sprues you can build up to 2 Sergeants or up to 2 Legionaries with a Nuncio Vox or up to 2 with a Vexilla. There’s some flexible  inflexibility with this. The Vexilla and Vox both attach to a point on a specific backpack but this backpack is on the main sprue so you get 4. The Sergeant stands out with his helmet crest and wargear options. He can have a Plasma Pistol and then either a Power Fist or Lightning Claw (The claw is the fist with claw attachments added) or a Power Sword. So, in theory you can create two squads of 10 Tactical Marines from one box.

There are a few differences between the two kits (beyond the armour mark itself). The MkVI kit comes with chain bayonets in addition to the regular bayonet attachments for their bolters that the MkIII kit gets. Whilst the two armour types have different power packs they connect in the same way so are interchangeable.

The sculpts are lovely on both kits but there are a couple of smaller issues to my mind. For instance, both the MkIII and MkVI kits have notches on the torsos where the arms connect to help with the positioning of these – useful for those bolter arms and the fiddliness of making them all line up. However, for the MkIII kit, these notches are also sprue connection points so they don’t tend to survive being clipped from the sprue very well. It’s not a massive issue but a potential frustration. Also, in the MkVI kit there are some of those sexy studded shoulder pads, however, they’re each in two parts on the sprues. Again,  or a huge issue but it does mean every single one is going to require some gap filling.

So, that’s all lovely from a Horus Heresy Tactical Squad sense but what about if you want to use these kits in the 41st millennium?

Well for a start, unless you’re looking for a lot of bolter marines, which let’s be honest, in 40k you’re almost certainly not, you’re going to have to find the wargear for these from elsewhere. I thought it’d be useful to provide some pictures of how these scale to other space marines and seeing as these were purchased for my Veterans of the Long War, Chaos Space Marines in particular.

As you would expect. The Primaris Marine is much bigger than the other three. There’s not a huge amount of difference between the Chaos, MkVI and MkIII armours although the Chaos Marines is slightly more hunched here so would be the second biggest.

Once you include their Power Packs, there becomes a more marked difference in size with the higher ‘vents’ on the anvillus / chaos pattern adding to the overall size of the Chaos Space Marines and making them feel almost on par with their Primaris cousins. The Power Packs aren’t compatible between the Chaos and Horus Heresy armour marks in that they don’t attach in the same way, however, you can clip off the connectors onto the torsos of each to allow you to fix the back directly to the backs of the marines if you wanted to mix them up.

Now let’s get rid of that Primaris Marine…

With similar power packs on each you get a better sense of the scale to eachother. The MkVI feels the smallest but there’s certainly not a level of deviation here that feels out of scale, just some bigger and some smaller which you’d expect seeing as we know how much cloning is frowned upon…

For my Creations of Bile / Emperor’s Children warband, I’ve mixed in the Horus Heresy Marines and parts with the Chaos Space Marine parts and I think that’s the sweet spot personally to tie them all together as a wider force. Some examples below seen in other posts on here.

The other thing the Horus Heresy Tactical Squads can be used for is the basis of Tactical Support Squads or Devastator Heavy Weapon Squads by introducing the relevant Heavy Weapons or Special Weapons kits. I’ve got some examples of how these work for the Horus Heresy Lascannon.

There are a couple of options with the Lascannons (and the other heavy weapons) whereby one in 5 can have an Augury Scanner in their offhand. The shoulder with the Lascannon mounted on it has more of a MkVI Shoulder but it all fits nicely on the MkIII armour and I’ve used one of th MkVI studded shoulder pads just to show some cross-compatibility here (the head is from the Chaos Space Marine Legionary Kill Team Heavy Gunner)

In case, like me, you wanted to see the Lascannon on  Chaos Space Marine armour you can see that above. The difference in size means that the second arm bracing the Lascannon doesn’t fit. I’ve just put the knife arm from the Chaos Legionary sprue on here as that’s what GW show for the Heavy Gunner, although I’m not a massive fan of the look the knife adds here.

So, to conclude a little bit, if you’re a Horus Heresy player you don’t need me to tell you too much about these kits. If you want any of Tactical, Tactical Support or Heavy Weapons Marines then you’ll be adding some of these to your Legion forces. If you’re looking at these for your Chaos Space Marines or for something else (colour me intrigued as to what – Blackshields maybe?) then you can definitely find value in these – for the number of bodies they’re not badly priced compared to the Chaos Marines for example, but unless you’re looking for Bolters you’re going to need to raid your bits box or think about how you’re supplementing these kits, but, they do work well with arms and weapons from elsewhere – and the arms and weapons from these also work well elsewhere. Hopefully this has been vaguely useful, let me know if there’s any other size comparisons or breakdowns of the bits that would add value here.