New Kratos Tank For Horus Heresy & Free 40k Rules: REVIEW

Eagle-eyed viewers of the stirring trailer for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy will have noticed something new for the Age of Darkness. If you were one of those people, award yourself five hobby points because you spotted the Kratos Heavy Assault Tank.

This tank is pretty awesome, and it has plenty of firepower to boot. Plus, it looks like it will be super fun to hobby on!

In terms of hitting power, the Kratos sits between the Sicarian and Fellblade, armed with a massive battlecannon, a volkite cardanelle, or a melta blast-gun – in other words, your choice of huge weapon to kill whichever type of unit might give the rest of your army problems. But what do these three new guns do?

New Horus Heresy Kratos Tank Size Comparison

This pic comes from Reddit and as you can see, this is going to be no joke! You can see it’s slightly smaller than the Spartan, but that is bigger than a normal Land Raider. So, the Kratos is going to be quite the presence on the battlefield and a looming danger for sure!

Alternatively, if you want to chew through massed ranks of enemy infantry, you can go with the volkite cardanelle. This giant heat ray will merrily melt the flesh from their lightly-armoured bones.

We hadn’t seen the weapons quite yet, so this is awesome! However, we’ve also seen rumored rules for the overall profile below!

You can see the guns are the same as they showed rules for, so we’d say these are pretty legit. One other thing to note, you have to pay for the third type of shell on the main cannon.

GW Drop Free 40k Kratos Heavy Assault Tank Rules

Outfitted as standard with the massive Kratos battle cannon and a co-axial autocannon, this tank means business. Should you wish to make different noises in your Shooting phase, you can swap the battle cannon for a melta blast-gun or searing volkite cardanelle. Oh, and did we mention the four extra guns mounted on its hull and sponsons? You can mix-and-match between heavy bolters, lascannons, volkite calivers and more.

With 18 wounds, a 2+ save, 8 Toughness, and plenty of weapons, this should really make an impact! It has some serious anti-infantry capabilities, and the Kratos Battlecannon can dish out some insane damage.

However, it seems strange to not make much sense to use anything other than the High Explosive round as the single-shot version has too easy a chance to miss or not wound randomly, maybe if it had two shots?

Not content with sporting some truly absurd firepower, the Kratos also has some truly absurd armour. With Toughness 8 with an impressive 18 Wounds, it’s a prime candidate for spearheading an armoured column, troops with its dozer blade, blasting holes in giant monsters – you name it, the Kratos can probably blow it up.

Coming in at 320 points (not including upgrades) this is quite expensive, but hey, nothing wrong with getting dual purpose out of the expensive mini!

Download the Rules for Free Here!

Horus Heresy Kratos Tank: Unboxing, Build & Magnetizing

Horus Heresy Kratos Heavy Assault Tank: $125

Click here to get yours for less from these retailers: | Amazon | Dicehead Games | Gold Goblin Games | Frontline Gaming

This actually also has rules for 40k, we’re not sure how much play it will see, but still nice to have the rules nonetheless!

This is quite the beefy kit as there are 6 sprues inside, a decal sheet, and the instructions

Instructions

All the HH instructions are done in the Necromunda style and not the new 40k style, but Rob hasn’t had any problems yet.

On this page, the track guards do look very similar to each other, but they are actually different pieces. Make sure you keep track of what’s what. The hull-mounted weapons look like they can just pop in and move around a little bit which is cool.

This is where magnetizing will really come into play, as you don’t only want one weapon choice! We’ll cover how to do that in a little bit.

Rob really isn’t a big fan of the dozer blade and it doesn’t really feel like it will be easy to magnetize.

Sprues

First up is the accessory sprue and we’ve seen it before with the Spartan, and Deimos Rhino but that doesn’t mean it’s not good.

The sponson weapons are very well-detailed and seem to be part of the tongue and groove system.

You get two identically mirrored sprues here and they also have parts of the dozer blades.

This sprue is what really makes it, however, Rob thinks they could easily put out a bunch of new kits similar to the Sicarian tank with just this sprue being different.

Assembled Kratos

This is quite the exciting build as we were able to make basically the whole thing modular.

You could theoretically magnetize the dozer blade, but it is just so big and not really worth the giant hassle in Rob’s opinion.

Size Comparison

You can see this is quite large and basically the same size as the Spartan!

Making it Modular

First up, you can actually just pop these hull sponson weapons in, so no need to glue or even magnetize them, which is just super awesome!

If you want to future-proof the side sponsons, you don’t even need magnets. You just pop the sensor off the top, switch out the guns, then put it back in the tank! However, there is a trick, Rob put a bunch of the Tamiya Extra Thin Cement in the bottom, lets it dry, and it becomes tight enough to actually just pop the weapons in there and they will hold on their own.

Now for the big guns. To start, the cowl on top of the weapons is the same for all of them. Rob didn’t actually magnetize it and just used a tiny bit of blue-tac to hold it on.

Then, you don’t glue in the top plate as it slots in well enough to not need glue. This will then give you access to the weapons.

With that off, you can just literally change out the weapons as you see fit. The only thing you will need to magnetize is the back plates. You can see how Rob put the 1/4″ diameter by 1/8″ deep magnets on there with a bit of extra sprue, and it will attract them.

As you can see above, the back pieces just pop right on once you have magnets ready. You do need to do this though so it covers up the gap in the back.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this is a really cool kit to build and GW made it quite easy to make it modular. Especially considering you really don’t need to magnetize much at all.