Cesare Borgia
The main villain in Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed : Brotherhood game is no other than the character whose figure I am reviewing today, Cesare Borgia.
Cesare Borgia was a real life historic character, whose accomplishments included being the Captain General in charge of the Pontific Armies and whose titles included that of Cardinal in the Catholic Church, Duke of Romaña, Duke of Valentinois and is reputed to have served as inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. Also, it is said that his was the face used by many Renaissance painters as the face of Christ.
In the game, Cesare is the head of The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, better known as the Kights Templar. Accordingly, Cesare’s action figure is sculpted to reflect his status as a nobleman and as a military commander. He wears an ornate plate mail over his torso and a red cardinal sash at his waist with a cape of the same color, complimented with knee-high riding boots.
The level of detail on the clothing is pretty decent, although the one really outstanding element is the ornate breastplate he wears, with a trio of sculpted seraphs. On the other hand, the head seems a tad too small and the face sculpt looks rather bland.
Cesare Borgia has the same articulation model manufacturer Unimax gave to Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli, consisting of:
• Ball jointed neck.
• Pegged hinge shoulders.
• Pegged hinge elbows.
• Swivel wrists.
• Floating torso.
• Ball jointed hips.
• Hinged knees.
• Pegged hinge ankles.
However, the implementation on Cesare is much more restricted across the board than I had anticipated. The shoulders are greatly impaired by the sculpted shoulder plates, the torso joint won’t even rotate to the sides, the neck can only work as a swivel joint and the T-bar hip design just doesn’t work with the rubber skirt piece.
Even though his time the elbows do have a decent range of movement, the knees can barely bend, so the only fully-functional joints in Cesare are the wrists and the ankles, and that’s simply appalling.
On a positive note, the paint applications on Cesare are actually pretty good, even though there is nothing particularly impressive here. Again, the breastplate is the one element that immediately attracts the eyes, with a burnished silver finish, while on the rest of the figure the decoration consists on solid blocks of color with just a touch of gold applied to some of the finer sculpted details.
The skin color used for Cesare lacks contrast between light and shadows, but the beard and eyebrows do help in providing structure to the facial features and even some nuance to the character, with a slightly raised eyebrow and something of a smirk conveyed by an asymmetrical mustache.
As far as accessories go, Cesare Borgia comes with a sword and a flintlock pistol, which can be held in either hand with no problems and are as neatly decorated as Cesare himself.
Even though I was somewhat disappointed by Cesare’s articulation, I feel it balances out with how the figure looks, especially considering I got Cesare for about 50% off the MSRP at a recent Convention. Factoring all in, my overall impression of Cesare Borgia is a positive, yet lukewarm, one.
Errex Score: 70/100
Category: Featured, Other Games, Toy Reviews, Video Games