Brutality! A review of Brutal Cities 15mm terrain Pt.1

Brutal Cities are an Australian terrain making company specialising in MDF terrain and 3D printing STLs and embracing the Brutalist aesthetic, making them ideal for WW3: Team Yankee. They were kind enough to send me a care package containing a bunch of laser cut MDF goodness, so much that I’ve had to split this review in two!

In this first part, we shall take a look at:

• Apartment Block / Plattenbau
• Plattenbau / Apartment Alternate Roof
• Plattenbau / Apartment Ruins
• Plattenbau / Apartment block – Internal Upgrade Pack
• Apartment Building
• 15mm Terrain – Ruined Buildings
• 15-28mm Terrain – Comms Tower

That’s quite a list! But the first four entries are all pretty much related, as we’ll get onto shortly.

Apartment Block/Plattenbau Modular System

The basic set

The Plattenbau was the piece that bought Brutal Cities to my attention. High rise apartments are one of those things that really look good on a Team Yankee table, differentiating them from a Flames of War one. Even the latter’s big city buildings have a very different look from the blocky post war concrete monstrosities that Team Yankee’s setting really needs.

The Plattenbau model is, much like the real thing built up through stand-along stacked floors. This allows the model to be very modular; some floors are built as dedicated ground floors with doorways and you can have alternative top floors.

Each floor is constructed in more or less the same way; a base plate, two stairwell walls and a long, continuous, back wall form the structural core. The laser has been used to etch in some surface detail like window sills and air vents and also used to sear the edges to make for a natural darker edge.

From there, the front and side walls are built on, forming two flats either side of a central stair well. Each flat has a balcony which is perfectly sized for a standard Battlefront medium base.

The side walls have a locating feature disguised as an air vent that pokes up into the next floor, keeping the stacked floors together.

It’s a neat system, allowing a player to add as many floors as they want. The base set comes with a dedicated ground and first floor (the first floor completes the entry way) and a flat roof with a central stairwell exit to give access to the roof.

Construction was relatively straightforward, despite there being no instructions supplied. Each MDF sheet builds one floor and the basic construction (stairwell walls, back wall, front walls then side wall) is always the same.
The only thing that caught me out the first time was the porch doors being handed. You also need to remember that the laser etched detail like window frames and the like is only on one side, so needs to be pointing outwards. I did find myself wishing that the side walls had a mid-way support (or third way support to keep the middle free for the locating tab) to give some better strength whilst building. I found a couple walls creeped out of alignment and that may have helped with that.

In game, the spacious interior lends itself well to Team Yankee and its need to track actual position in buildings. The height of the apartment block, especially with more than two floors on, may throw some interesting tactical challenges as it towers over surrounding buildings.

It also has me thinking of using the Flames of War city fighting rules, treating the two flats and stairwell as three separate buildings, as well as using the enhanced “Brutal” rules for urban fighting. BRING UP THE TOS!

Alternate Roof

As already mentioned, the Plattenbau set is engineered to be modular. This set embraces that by adding an alternative roof and an alternative doorway.

The alternative roof is a slightly more complex version of the one in the basic set that basically adds four small walls to give a ledge to the flat roof. It also has a slightly different stairwell exit building. The construction is very straightforward and, honestly, I prefer this roof to the basic one. It’s just a lot more interesting.

The alternative entryway is a single piece that replaces the stairwell wall with a door, converting a normal floor into a ground floor. Handy if you want to turn one multi-storey complex into two smaller ones.

Oddly, the piece seemed to have its alignment tabs cut shorter than the piece it replaced, leaving a small gap on each side. It’s not especially noticeable at table-top level, though.

Ruined Upper Floor

Fighting in urban areas brings modern, high-powered, weaponry into close contact with buildings that can’t even stop the sounds of the upstairs washing machine hitting full spin, and the end-result is seldom good for the building.

To reflect this, Brutal Cities do an alterative floor that is basically a bombed out skeleton, complete with a large hole to the floor below, turning a Plattenbau into a ruin.

Construction was a little trickier than a standard floor, solely because you need to do a good dry fit session to suss out where the ruined walls go in the absence of any instructions. Some of the walls also have very thin parts due to the damage and I managed to break one piece off whilst removing it from the sprue. Thankfully the damaged nature of the piece helped hide that!

That said, once you have it sussed, the build is as quick as the other floors.

It’s a neat idea for a piece, thought I found it looked a bit odd on top of a stack of intact floors. It’s best used with one ground floor, with the alternate entryway so you don’t need the two floors to make the entry porch, to give the impression of all that’s left from a taller structure.

Internal Upgrade Pack

The final module is a somewhat specialist one. The Internal Upgrade pack adds three T-shaped internal walls to each floor. This splits the two flats up into small rooms and splits part of the stair well off into what I suspect is meant to be the water closet for each flat. It also adds a set of stairs to the stair well.

It’s a neat addition, but one that is somewhat situational. For Team Yankee it doesn’t add much and just makes it harder to position large base teams in the back of the apartment.
What it would be great for is a more skirmish rule set, or something like Twilight 2000, where fighting in the apartment may be the entire focus of the game, and the figures will likely be on individual bases rather than section bases.

The stairs are neat though. Kinda wish they were part of the basic set, now.

The additional walls can be built and painted separately and added when needed, so its worth getting some of you think you may want to do some 15mm skirmish in the future.

Apartment Building

Brutal Cities call this an apartment, but it feels more like the pre-fab office buildings that seem to be a feature of post-war low-medium density business/industrial estates.

Either way, it’s a very simple five-piece MDF construction that is cheap (kind of, more on that at the end), quick to build and a good way of building out a city board. The laser has been again used to add some decent detail to the walls, including the window detail, air vents and some architectural points of interest.

They also come with some small low wall sections to make an enclosure. I forgot to mention it, but so does the Plattenbau set. It’s a nice way of using up space on the sheet, I guess.

However, this building has no internal floors and is a simple box. Not great for Team Yankee and its need to track the actual position of the team in the building, but not insurmountable (especially with a flat roof) and less of an issue in games with more abstract building rules. The kit is available with and without windows cut out, and I think that may make more sense as the windows cut out just shows the alck of detail inside.

Ruined Building

This is a ruined version of the previous “Apartment Building” which is, in itself, quite a nice feature. Unlike the ruined floor of the Plattenbau, this ruin better captures the full destructive power of modern warfare on the urban landscape with the ever wall and floor showing destruction. It’s a very visually impressive ruin, with the laser being used to etch cracks in the facade and show brick detail on the edges, suggesting this is a combined brick and concrete construction.

It was also a swine to build. Whilst I had breezed through the un-ruined version of this building, and sussed out the art to making the Plattenbau fairly quickly, here I was cursing the lack of instructions. With only one “intact” wall, the rest of the building relies on five long struts to hold the floor up, plus a central stair well shaft. Originally I thought the stair well could drop in towards the end, but then found that the top roof partially covered it. Also, the stair well is slightly offset to one side, so the floor definitely has a correct “up” face, something I didn’t realise till halfway through reconstructing it for the second time. Unlike the upper floors, it has no etched cracks to indicate it has an “up”. The model doesn’t lend itself to a dry fit as it can’t fully support its weight and the first and second floors need to be in place at the same time, so most of this was found whilst working with the PVC glue.

Eventually, by going to the website and very carefully examining the photos on the site of the demo model, I realised what was going and got to the end of the build. It’s actually quite a nice ruin when you do finish it! I’d suggest building the stair well first and letting that dry, then using that, the first floor and the large relatively intact wall to check the ground floor is up the right way. Then, glue the stairwell to the ground floor and leave to dry. That will give you and core to work from as you need to add the two large floors, the intact wall and the struts all at the same time, shuffling them into place. Once that’s all dry you can then add the fascia walls as they are all nonstructural and free floating. It’s probably the most complex build of the kits in this part of the review, but it is worth it, in my opinion.

The floors are mostly sized for standard flames of war bases, but the weird offset of the stair well means medium bases couldn’t quite fit in between the stair well and fascia wall.

This and the fact that the floors aren’t removable can make the ruins fiddly to use in a game. However, you can at least see actual position in building.

Despite these niggles, I can’t argue that the final ruin doesn’t look the part, especially with some debris added. Along with the ruined Plattenbau floor, this is a good way to make a ruined city landscape for Cold War Gone Hot wargaming. Just take your time and build that stair well first!

Communications Tower

Another character piece, the comms tower helps differentiate a WW2 Flames of War board from a Team Yankee board. Fitted with an array of cell and radio/TV antenna, the comms tower is distinctly modern; maybe even a little too modern for TY’s notional 198X time frame. However, much like the model range, it likely pays not to think too much about that.

Construction is pretty straightforwrad. The tower is made up of four a-frames that can be assembled together as one sub-assembly (there is also a square base they go into but I left that off for painting), an antenna nest of 12 rectangular disches that attached to two triangular pieces as another sub assembly, then six drum anttena sub-assemblies that are each made of two circles and a U piece.

Again, there are no instructions here but it was simple enough to work out how to build in these three major groups. The only thing I’d note is that there isn’t much meat around the mounting hole in the rectangular antenna and I manged to break one snapping it off the sprue. Best to cut them off!

Once they were all dry, I simply glued the antenna nest to the top of the tower and the drum antennas to the frame. In hindsight I should have left the drum antenna off the tower till they were painted.

It’s a pretty neat piece. It doesn’t have much in-game effect, maybe a small area of tall impassable terrain that only conceals rather than blocks line of fire, but it adds a lot of atmosphere. Its base has also been sized so that it can fit quite easily on some of the roofs of the buildings in the range; perfect for urban communications!

It’s marketed as 15mm to 28mm scale model but its essentially scaleless and seemed fine next to 8mm Battletech and Legions Imperialis models too. You can see it next to a 32mm Space Marine above.

I’d love to see an electrical pylon built on the same construction prinicpals but slightly larger.

Butchers Bill – The Price

The comms tower comes in at £14. The simple “Apartment building” is £20. The Plattenbrau starts at £36 for three stories and £56 for five with the accessory parts costing £8-£12 and additional floors, currently out of stock, costing £23 for two stories. The Ruined Apartment Building costs £21 singly or you can get a two pack for £36 which is a pretty neat deal for building out a ruined board.

So, on the face of it, the price for these parts is reasonable but there are two factors to consider:

• These are coming from Australia so postage is going to be a factor. One ruined apartment ships for £13 whilst the order I just placed for two 5 story aparments and some other bits was closer to £40.
• These are coming from outside the UK so the taxman will want his cut. You are going to need to allow 20% plus whatever handling cost the couriers charge on top of the price.

These costs are not shared to dissuade a potential buyer, I still think the value is there, but to educate and inform so you can plan accordingly.

You also need to plan for the primer costs. That MDF is thirsty!

Final Thoughts

As you probably picked up in the discussion on the price, the Barn Denizens and I were sufficiently impressed by the Plattenbrau that I ordered another two blocks and another “Apartment Building“. I always feel that the reviewer following up a freely supplied care package with his own order has to be the largest postive enditment that can be issued.

Some will find the lack of instructions and need to puzzle the construction out (using dry fits and the photos on the website) to be too frustrating to contemplate, and I almost reached the point of agreeing with them with the Ruined Apartment Building. However, the other kits are pretty straightforward to put together and, ruins included, they all give a suitably impressive look once painted up.

I definetly recommend giving Brutal Cities a look.

Next up, we’ll look at the “Bruteopolis Tower”, “Brutal Civic Centre” and their 15mm roads. Just as soon as the British Summer lets me get them painted up…

Lee