Cold Warriors

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have the slowest of slow-burn niche nostalgia projects constantly running in the background in the form of slowly collecting and painting versions of the characters from Freedom Force, a superhero tactical RPG from 2002.

Things had been quiet on this front for a while until Crooked Dice released their Cold Warriors pack, generic Soviet era soldier primarily aimed at Cold War Spy-Fi.

You might spot that I've not exactly gone for era appropriate uniform colours.

This is because these models have more than a passing resemblance to the goons of one of the key villains of the game: Nuclear Winter.

The Frost Warriors and Ice Troopers show up when a Soviet agent gives ice-themed powers, Nuclear Winter, freezes part of Patriot City to get hold of a nuclear submarine.

Our heroes, the eponymous Freedom Force, have to battle through a veritable legion of these freeze-ray-armed henchmen to get to the big bad and save the day 

As you can see from my Ice Troopers, the Cold Warrior models are not an exact match for the game models, but they are a close fit, and I particularly liked the piping on their coats.

Rather than attempt to give them goggles, which I'm sure wouldn't be too difficult, I've opted for giving them ice blue eyes. I didn't attempt any gun modification either, instead choosing to just paint their AK-47s blue.

All in all, the are close enough, which has been the core ethos of this project.

The Frost Warriors are a little bit tougher in game and I'm actually torn on whether I like what I've done with this model.

On the down side, the coat being longer means there's no grey trousers to prevent the red with white piping giving somewhat of a Commie-Santa vibe - he comes down the chimney and shares the presents out equally.

The grey beard and the snow aren't helping.

However, I am deeply amused by the fact that with a grey beard he looks more than a little like Jeremy Corbyn, the teensy-bit left wing former leader of the Labour party.

This now gives me a usable Nuclear Winter cast for games of 7TV. I'm not sure if I'd get to 30 ratings yet (a star, a co-star and 4 henchmen), but I can always add in my more generic thugs, who are found working for Nuclear Winter before he transforms.

There are a couple more henchmen to pick up for this bad guy: Shurales (yeti-type monsters) and Snow Men (you can guess what they are), which should bulk out the cast appropriately if I can lay my hands on suitable models.

I'm due a bit of an influx of minis usable in Freedom Force minis from a Kickstarter I back a while ago, and so it's good to get moving on this project again.

Acquired: -100

Painted: 267

Lead Mountain: 683