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Dominic Santiago

January 31, 2014 | By Errex More

I was not really expecting NECA to follow through with their 1:18 scale Gears of War action figures. I figured they’d do the first series and leave it at that, but apparently I was wrong and they came up with three more figures for Series 2.
Now, that previous statement is not entirely accurate, since at least one of the figures included in Series 2 is the very same Marcus Fenix that was released with Series 1, only with a new cardback. The other two figures are Augustus Cole and the subject of today’s review, Dominic Santiago.

Santiago follows the characteristic design aesthetics of this series, being rather thick and bulky, partly due to the armor designs but also because the male characters in this game are humongous.

As expected, there is an insane amount of detail covering each surface, from the cracks and scratches on the armor to the veins and folds on Dominic’s skin. The head is sculpted bare, and even though the character sports a rather bushy beard, there is a very clear amount of expression on his face.

Even though the character design does limit somewhat Dom’s dynamic range, the articulation is pretty decent and consists of:

• Barbell mounted head.

• Pegged hinge shoulders.

• Hinged elbows.

• Pegged hinge wrists.

• Barbell mounted torso.

• Pegged hinge hips.

• Upper thigh swivels.

• Hinged knees.

• Upper calf swivels.

Dominic’s utility belt has some very large attachments that further limit the range of motion at the hips and he also lacks arm swivels to allow him to grab his provided weapon in two hands, even though this time his weapon is a sawn-off shotgun, which I guess would not be a problem for him to shoot one-handed.
The paint job on Santiago is pretty decent. The whole uniform has shading washes applied to enhance the sculpted textures and also give a tarnished feel to the armored bits. The base color for the chest armor plates is a very dark silvery-blue hue, complemented with pale yellow markings.

Dom has a very large tattoo on his right arm depicting an angel and the name Maria scrawled on a parchment underfoot. The tattoo is painted neatly in clean black lines, even though the contrast is a bit too stark to look realistic at this scale.