Back in the olden days of Zoids, Hellrunner (known to the rest of the world as Merda, which will never not be hilarious to me) was one of my favorites. And ever since then I’ve liked the idea of bipedal dinosaur windup Zoids, so when it came out in the second half of the NJR era, the Gun Sniper seemed like a great Zoid to me. It’s a bipedal dinosaur with guns everywhere, a nicely skeletal design and an old school-style clear canopy head – all things I love. But as we all know, Tomy’s execution left a good bit to be desired. So when I heard that there was going to be an HMM version, I thought maybe Kotobukiya’s Gun Sniper would finally live up to the design’s potential. Sadly, you probably know by now that it also didn’t – the colors are like a distilled version of every stupid color choice Kotobukiya’s designers ever made, and if you want the kit to look anywhere near its appearance in the box pics, you’re going to be giving your detailing brush a workout.

But I kind of felt like building something small and simple, and I had some new products and techniques that I wanted to try out on a kit that I wouldn’t mind ruining, so I finally got my Gun Sniper out of its box, years after I bought it, and fired up the compressor. The challenge was, try a bunch of stuff you’ve never tried before, and try to make the kit presentable.

The first thing that needed to happen and that I basically never do was priming. Lots and lots of priming. I didn’t bother snapping the kit together before painting, so I can’t show you what it looks like OOB, but it’s almost entirely purple, and if you’ve ever tried to paint over purple without priming, well… you probably left a little piece of your sanity behind that day, and the less said about it, the better.

I used Vallejo’s Surface Primers for the job. I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like their primer that comes in spraycans much, but the airbrush primers work beautifully. You’re supposed to use them without thinner, which seems a bit odd at first, and you’ll definitely want to up the pressure and keep an eye on whether your nozzle’s clogging up, but I really didn’t have much trouble with them. They come in every color imaginable, but to me it just seems most practical to keep a bit of the black and the white around.

The simplest part of the paintjob were the sections that I decided were undercarriage. All I did here was a base coat of Tamiya’s gun metal over black primer, drybrushed with chrome silver for that worn metal look. Then I topcoated it with Vallejo’s Satin Varnish.

Notice the brake lights. No, I’m not shutting up about how Kotobukiya puts brake lights on every Zoid.

Now, about those Vallejo varnishes – I’m more fed up with spray cans than I can possibly put into words, so having top coats that I can apply with an airbrush feels like heaven. And I do get exactly the degree of control out of it that I was missing when I was using spray cans. I’ll also say, though, that despite supposedly being water-based acrylics, these Vallejo varnishes are freaking toxic. The day I started using them, I immediately bought a respirator, and I never use them without it. Appearance wise, they’re great – obviously the biggest potential issue is top coating metallics like the gun metal here, but like with Tamiya’s, the satin (which is Vallejo vernacular for semi-gloss) leaves the metallic effect more or less intact.

I also did some detailing on the weapons. You probably know by now that I do love me some stripes around my gun barrels, and soot on the muzzles, and of course those eleventy billion beer can launchers needed painting as well. I used yellow for all of this because the cameras on the shoulders were going to be red and the color scheme overall is rather muted, so I didn’t want something that called too much attention to itself. Sadly, drybrushing chrome silver over the yellow missiles ended up making them look a bit more messy than I would’ve liked, but that’s kind of a running theme with the weathering I did on this kit.

The claws and teeth, as well as the caps and a few pistons here and there, are Tamiya’s titanium gold with white drybrushing. You’ll remember I used this color combo on the Death Stinger and threatened to keep using it on every kit from there on out. The smaller toes are actually molded in one piece, so I had to paint on the gold separately. This is really annoying because the big toes actually do come in two separate pieces, but it wasn’t all that hard to paint, so I’m not too miffed about it. It’s just that this kit is littered with this sort of problem.

The armor parts took a few more steps. The base colors are Gunze’s Khaki Green and German Tank. I really just had two jars of each lying around from what must be at least ten years ago at this point and decided to finally use them. Turns out the two colors go together really well.

The paint chipping was done with chrome silver on the green and gun metal on the tan parts. This didn’t work out as well as I would’ve liked – the chrome silver basically turned to white when I gloss coated it for the wash, and the gun metal also lost its sheen and now reads more like dirt because it’s indistinguishable from the wash. I guess I’ll have to do this after gloss coating next time. It all still looks okay, just not really the way I had planned.

The washes are done with Vallejo’s Streaking Grime on the tan parts and Engine Grease on the green parts. This, too, didn’t quite turn out the way I had intended; on the green parts you can barely see it (although it does make a difference, the parts looked far more bland and uniform before the wash, you’ll just have to take my word for it), and while I like how the tan parts turned out, I really didn’t want them to look quite this dirty, or at least not originally. It’s just weird – all of these parts have the same gloss coat on them, and I watered down the washes to roughly the same degree, but it really stuck to the tan parts and wiped right off the green.

The tail required a bit of masking. I decided early on that I was going to have a dark color on top and a light one underneath to mimic a lizard or a snake’s belly, and the only way to carry that through to the tail was to split the armor parts into two halves. That worked out rather nicely, if I do say so myself.

The grey parts were base-coated with Tamiya’s light grey, then chipped with gun metal, then washed with Vallejo’s Engine Grease, and then I went over the bigger ones again with the same, not thinned this time, to create the streaking. The wash ended up clumping in some places when I did the streaking; I think I probably should’ve let the first wash cure overnight and/or topcoated it as some of this seems to be the first wash coming loose. Again, not quite what I had planned, but it actually came out looking good because it definitely reads as just… filthy. Which is what I wanted.

One thing that bothers me is this big glob on both of the missile pod hatches. The wash just pooled here and when I noticed it I decided not to do anything about it because it seemed like it made sense that the dirt would have pooled on the underside of the hatches, but now I don’t like the way it looks, and because the hatches don’t close properly, I have to have them open at all times. Sigh.

One other new thing that I did here was add these cracks to the canopy. I did this with a pin that I heated up with a lighter. Works really well, but one problem I noticed is that the pin cools down very quickly, so you tend to dig really deeply into the plastic at first and then not anymore after a few seconds. The ridges I got this way look basically like battle damage, so it’s fine, but I’ll have to do some more experimenting with this technique before I’ve got it all figured out. I also dabbed some light grey on there with a makeup sponge to make it look dirty.

Since the canopy’s clear, I decided I also needed to paint the pilot. As you can see, I really only did some very basic detailing here because I really stink at miniature painting and I figured it just needed to look somewhat convincing with the canopy closed. The paints are Tamiya’s Red Brown and Desert Yellow.

I won’t bother with a detailed build report as I actually painted some of the parts half assembled (also a first for me), and besides, it’s not terribly interesting, just kind of frustrating because there’s all manner of parts fit issues that of course were made worse by the paintjob. It just wasn’t fun, and I also broke one of the pegs that the shoulders are attached to and ended up having to fix it with a pin and superglue.

One somewhat noteworthy part of the build is that they decided to recycle these hoses from the Genos here; you only need the big ones, and the instructions tell you to trim them down to 37 mm. You then thread them into the neck, where they’re basically invisible. Big whoop. At least it’s not as fiddly to do as it is on the Genos, I guess.

And here’s a few shots of the finished product. Overall, I’m happy with how it came out, but I definitely have to think of it as a big accumulation of semi-successful experiments. There’s a lot of stuff here that came out much more messy than I intended, and while most of it still works, I’ll definitely be… adjusting my methods with some of these products, let’s say.

So, should you get this kit? I’m gonna say no. I do think I succeeded at making it presentable, and with a bit of patience, you can probably replicate the build photos on the box well enough if that’s what you want to do, but just OOB, the kit really just doesn’t look good. The only HMM kit I know that’s less accurate to its own box pictures is the Pteras. And then there’s the numerous engineering problems like the missile pods not closing properly (I’m convinced it’s not paint getting in the way) and the generally un-fun build, and to top it all off, poseability is also distinctly unimpressive.

If you really love the Gun Sniper or if you’re like me and you just like bipedal dinosaur Zoids in general, and if you’re willing to put a good amount of time and effort into painting the li’l guy, though, go ahead. It’s not a garbage kit or anything, just not very good.

Paints used:

Tamiya:

Light Grey

Titanium Gold

White

Gun Metal

Chrome Silver

Lemon Yellow

Desert Yellow

Red Brown

Vallejo:

Surface Primer Black

Surface Primer White

Matt Varnish

Satin Varnish

Gloss Varnish

Weathering Effects: Streaking Grime

Weathering Effects: Oil Stains

Gunze:

German Tank

Khaki Green