Customeeple Review Part 1: Introduction and Neon City Yu Jing S Sushi + Bonsai

Hello Everyone!

With my extra holiday money I recently made a big order of terrain from Customeeple to improve my gaming table and fulfill my dream of having a Yu Jing Style Fast Food area Table.

I ordered almost everything Yu Jing related from Customeeple, which means this will be a multi part review!

For the first part I will take an in depth look at the Neon City Yu Jing S Sushi and Bonsai buildings that they have in store.

http://www.customeeple.com/product/infinity-modular-buildings-yu-ying/

The package arrived relatively quick after I ordered it, in about 2 weeks. Considering that it was quite the big order, they cut to order, and they must have been pretty busy with their new release of theĀ Forbidden Palace and Ariadna terrain at that time, I think that was quite quick. I live in Austria (Europe) and as far as I know the company is from Spain.

When the package arrived I was quite surprised how small it was considering all the stuff inside, but this was just due to proper packing as I was about to find out.

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For this review we will take a look at this package:

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The package comes with an instruction sheet which can also be downloaded from their homepage should you lose it or your 2 1/2 year old son decides to “play” with it šŸ˜‰

Here’s the pdf for theseĀ buildings:

Click to access Neoncity-Yujing-Sushi-Bonsai.pdf

I found that the instruction sheet is quite helpful, but they also slightly differ from the online pdf version (and the real product I got….but both differed from that a little..) but I would have wished for some better close ups of unexpectedly small details.

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For example I didn’t figure out that the sliding doors of the Bonsai Shop were supposed to have 2 bottom parts at first (learned that with my other sets though) because even though the picture showed that detail, it wasn’t specifically marker and I just assumed it was the 1 piece that obviously looked like the door bottom.

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The doors of the Bonsai Shop also looked different on the instruction sheet than in reality, on the sheet I kind of expected 4 plastic doors, but in reality 2 of them were mdf with chinese signs on them. At first I wasn’t too sure which one belonged on which side (I hadn’t attached the sign on top yet which would have given that away) and had to compare it with a picture on the website, but once I did that everything was clear enough.

The only part that really troubled me was that the instruction sheet showed 3 roof walls….and even though I searched like crazy I could only find 2 for each of the buildings, which I found odd since it would create some bad cover situations in game when compared to other buildings. But after double checking it with the website again, I saw that they only have up to two roof walls there as well, and once I put everything together it actually looked quite nice with the different wall heights.

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Each building comes with a ventilation part for the roof, a door for the side and a pannel to reach the roof from the inside, as well as one set of stairs, a awesome row of benches for the Sushi restaurant, and ladders for the sides.

Now I am pretty sure I was just too stupid to figure it out properly in time before I gave up, but I had a bit of a problem with the ladders. I just couldn’t figure out how to attack them to the side of the buildings without having the lower end hanging in mid air, or at a strange angle to the side.

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So I did what every terrain builder with too much awesome terrain in front of him, and too little patience would do…and built the ladders slightly different and simply attached them to the sides ;-P I think the results still look great, but I feel a bit sad that I couldn’t do the, most likely quite awesome, idea of the designers justice there.

Another set of “too impatient to figure it out” must have been the roof walls of the buildings. No matter what I did, there always seemed to be a small slit in between the parts…I couldn’t figure that one out for any of the Neon City Yu Jing buildings, so I simply rolled with it, and in the end it hardly mattered anymore, but if you know what I did wrong, it’d be lovely advice for all the other people out there interested in getting one of these buildings!IMG_1214

Noooow…..once I finished building everything, which actually went along quite fast and without much of a problem besides the above mentioned confusion of mine, I instantly started painting the buildings.

I don’t have an airbrush, so I painted everything by hand, and I went for a dark and dirty style of building to get in line with my idea of “The Neon Dragon” a dirty city where the Imperial State Service is the only thing in between it’s citizens and corruption, alien and non Yu Jing threats and self destruction ;-P

So without further delay, here are the results of my low painting skills. The miniatures next to the buildings are obviously not included in the order, I just added them for scale.

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(Panda Squad Tattoo also not included…I got that one from my local Zoo šŸ˜‰ but the wall takes it easily and I think it fits perfectly !)

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After the painting process and my first game with the new terrain, the only thing I didn’t quite like was the fact that the buildings had no floor.

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If you go for some closeups of troop movement this will often be seen, and it breaks immersion a little bit. But since I also ordered some newer buildings from the Customeeple line of products I can happily say that it seems like they have improved on that area as these new buildings all come with proper floors and detachable roofs instead.

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All in all I am VERY happy with these buildings. The size is perfect, they fit into the Infinity univserse easily, they give good cover and fit together with other terrain nicely. They come with a lot of little extra bits and bobs like plastic windows and the roof parts, and for the most part they are easy to assemble and paint.

The small problems I had with assembling it were mostly due to my own lack of attention or small inconsistencies between the parts and the instruction sheet, but they are easily outdone by the finished buildings.

All in all I would give this set a 8/10 and I would recommend it for every Infinity player who is a fan of Yu Jing Style buildings.