The Mandalorian may be in hiatus, but that’s not stopping us from getting some great figures from the series. I’ve checked out a few figures from Hot Toys offerings, but I’ve also got a small stack from Hasbro’s 6-inch Black Series and 3 3/4-inch Vintage Collection. And some of them are Stormtroopers! I LOVE STORMTROOPERS!!! I don’t open the Vintage Collection stuff, but I’ll get around to showing it off one day when I’m short on time, but the Black Series is all fair game to tear into!

At the beginning of the year, I took a look at Hasbro’s excellent new Black Series Imperial Stormtrooper from The Mandalorian. These new recruits are basically variants built off of that updated figure. The Remnant Stormtrooper has been out for a little while, but the Artillery Stormtrooper just arrived and as far as I know is an Amazon Exclusive! I’m going to start with the Remnant Trooper since I don’t have a whole lot to say about him.

As expected, The Remnant is just a dirtied up repaint of the updated Stormtrooper, and that’s fine! I’ll refer you to that earlier review for all the improvements on articulation and tweaks to the sculpt that this Stormtrooper body introduced. Here, the once pristine white armor is now marred with chipping and some very light brownish-orange spray. Everything just looks delightfully flatter and grungier than the regular Stormy, and shows off what happens when you can’t hop on The Empire’s website and order fresh replacement armor for your goons. The chipping is heaviest on the helmet and left shoulder, as well as the upper thigh pieces. There’s also a smattering of it elsewhere. I think the chipping looks great, but I thought it odd how little there is on the back. Indeed, apart from the heavy chipping on the back of the left thigh piece, the back of the armor is almost totally clean. It kind of looks like Hasbro just forgot to do the back, except for that one piece.

The newer helmet sculpt still looks great, although I’ve spoken to a few people who preferred the older one. To be honest, I don’t really have a preference, and I’m fine intermingling my Black Series troopers with each other. The painted details are pretty sharp, and as for accuracy, I’m not enough of a Star Wars gearhead to notice a lot of the subtle differences. Not to mention, I would imagine there were lots of variations in the screen used props over the years.

Hasbro has been pretty good about making The Mandalorian Stormtroopers accessible. And I was able to pick up three of these guys without any difficulty. It’s not nearly as many of the regular Stormies I got when they released, but this was a rare case where my good senses told me to be happy with three. It would have been cool if they varied up the distress to the armor, but I can appreciate how that would be costly for a mass-produced action figure, and the fact that these three suits just happened to chip in all the exact same spots doesn’t really phase me. I still wish they had kept the holster for the E-11 Blasters from the original Black Series Stormies, but otherwise I love these guy a lot! OK, let’s move on to the star of the show… The Artillery Stormtrooper!

This guy made his appearance in Episode 14, The Tragedy, and as his name suggests, he’s basically a mortar specialist. Once again, we get the new Stormtrooper with improved articulation and the lack of an E-11 holster, and distinguished by both the yellow markings on his armor and the yellow officer’s pauldron on his right shoulder. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I am not a fan of carrying the specialized armor markings from The Clone Wars over to the Imperial Stormtroopers. It felt like a cheap excuse to sell toys back then, and it still does. It’s the kind of thing I expect to see in a video game so the player can tell what kind of enemy they’re dealing with. And it’s especially weird to see it just appearing now in The Mandalorian after never turning up in The Original Trilogy. I think the yellow pauldron would have been enough, and it’s the main reason I’m skipping the Hot Toys releases of this guy and the Incinerator Trooper. And yet with all that being said, I still dig this guy well enough.

There are no notable changes to the helmet, apart from the added yellow markings, which looks like he’s dipped his face in a bucket of mustard. I do really like the sculpt and coloring on the pauldron! The subtle creases where the strap is pulling at it is a really nice touch.

His specialist equipment consists of a backpack and the mortar. The pack holds four “mortar shells,” which I think are just supposed to be the thermal detonators that the regular Stormtroopers wear on the back of their belts. Three of these are sculpted into the pack, but the one on the far right can be removed and loaded into the mortar. The horizontal yellow cylinder looks like it could be some kind of specialty shell, but I’m not sure. The pack plugs into the “O I” on the backpack and it stays put pretty well. There are some fixtures on the sides, which look like brackets, but it doesn’t appear to be designed to hold the mortar, which is a shame.

The mortar is pretty big and features a ball joint at the base and a hinged bi-pod. It stands pretty well and I love the fact that you can load it. “Fire in the hole!!!” Normally, I would have preferred to be manning the WEB Blaster, but after seeing how that thing can be taken out with one well placed shot to the power source, I’m thinking these mortars might be the better way to go. Your far from the action, and accuracy doesn’t really count as much. You really just have to worry about one of those filthy space wizards using The Force to toss the shell back at you. But what are the odds of running into one of those these days, right?

In addition to all the mortar gear, this fellow also comes with a standard E-11 Blaster, which is the same one issued to the Stormtroopers, both Remnant and otherwise. But seriously, is there a petition somewhere to bring back the holsters?

For someone who ran out of space a long time ago, I sure love to troop build! It’s totally irrational, but I just can’t help myself. I think it stems from back when I was a kid and the biggest pie-in-the-sky dream I could have was to have a dozen Stormtroopers for my Rebels to fight. And here i am now with no one to stop me! I’m content with just the one Artillery Stormtrooper, but I can’t say I wouldn’t pick up a couple more Remnant Troopers if they cross my path. Either way, these are great figures and a fine addition to anyone’s Imperial Forces!