In case you missed it, Storm Collectibles has been delivering on a rather robust line of action figures based on SEGA’s fantasy arcade coin-op Golden Axe. Or based on the excellent SEGA Genesis port, if you happen to be a home body or just grew up after arcades have become nearly extinct. Since the line’s debut in 2020, they’ve given us all three playable heroes: Ax Battler, Tyris Flare, and Gilius Thunderhead, along with a bunch skeletons and bosses in the game. And now, here we are, finally getting a two-pack of the Death Adder’s evil grunts that plague you most often: Heninger and Long Moan!

The figures come in a wide window box that shows off the goods. There’s some rather large renders of the figures on the front as well, which is kind of redundant. As always, the tray is placed against a recreation of the Player Select screen, which is both clever and looks great. I’ve been playing the Golden Axe series on my Genesis for decades and I never actually new that these guys had names. Word is that they were both named after booze manufacturers: The Henninger Brewery and Longmoan Distillery. I’m going to start with Heninger, but first, let’s just take a look at this…

What is even going on here? Look at all these hands!!! Six pairs for each figure, that’s twenty-four hands in this package! I’m never going to complain about extra accessories, but I think this was a bit excessive. These aren’t even main characters, they’re just goons you beat up over and over again. They even made slight changes in the skin tone for each figure. Anyway, I’ll try to work each pair into at least one picture, but no promises. And I’m not going to run through all of them, because I don’t even know what to call some of these. Just take a look and see for yourself. Hands!

So, Heninger is probably the least interesting of the two as he’s just a muscular man in some tight grey undies. I was honestly expecting this figure to borrow heavily from Ax Battler, especially when I saw how similar the arm bracers are, but that’s far from the case. The bodies are completely different and Ax Battler is a lot bigger than this lowly henchmen. Heninger has a bit of armor, including silver bracers and shin plates, as well as some silver shoulder armor that is worn by the figure via some soft plastic straps. He’s perfect for a generic thug and would probably even work pretty well for a number of different genres. The silver paint on the armor is nice and shiny, the skin tone is warm and even, and the musculature is extremely detailed.

The head sculpt is very good, but definitely contributes to the generic goon thing this figure has got going on. He’s wearing a white headband, has a thin beard and mustache, and is gritting his teeth in anger. Nothing about the portrait really shouts medieval fantasy to me, so you can easily have this guy going up against any of your Storm figures.

If you’ve played around with any of Storm’s male figures, you should know what to expect from the excellent articulation here. Some of the highlights include double hinges in both the knees and elbows, ball joint in both the waist and abs, crunches in the shoulders, and even toe hinges. Storm’s joints have buttery smooth motion and these figures are very tough to put down once you start messing around with them. The balance is also superb!

Heninger comes with a spiked mace with a rather large head and a stout handle. The whole thing is sculpted and painted to look like it’s forged in iron. Among the crazy array of hands are a pair of gripping hands, so he can wield the mace in either hand.

And here’s a quick comparison of Heninger with Ax Battler to show their differences in build and muscle sculpting. Now, let’s move on to Long Moan!

Long Moan sports a much more medieval look with his crude tunic and spiked helmet. The tunic is cast in soft plastic and worn by the figure. It has a really nice rough crosshatch texture that resembles burlap and rough cut edges at the shoulders and bottom edges. It’s cinched at the waist with a black belt that includes a silver buckle and painted belt loops. Yeah, belt loops were probably not a thing back in medieval times, but I appreciate the effort at detail. His light khaki boots lack the armor plates we saw with Heninger and he has white sculpted wrappings on his forearms instead of the silver bracers. The bright turquoise tunic has a little wash to show some soiled spots. As with Heninger, I expected a lot of borrowed parts with this figure, as the tunic looked an awful lot like Gilius’, but once again it wasn’t the case and it’s an all new sculpt.

The spiked helmet is removable and the underlying head is rather generic, but still a solid sculpt. While his buddy looks perpetually angry, Long Moan just looks like he’s board and waiting for the weekend to arrive so he can hit the local tavern for ale and wenches. The helmet is painted to match the tunic and adds some excellent silver trim to the horns and borders. It does sit a little loose on his head, and I find that I’m frequently having to push it back a bit so it’s not covering his eyes. This may have been done on purpose, as I’ve seen some character art showing it down over his eyes and even the render on the box looks like it’s worn low like that.

The articulation is identical to Heninger, but the lower part of the tunic can inhibit his hip articulation a bit. There are slits on the sides to help, but it still makes those exta wide stances a harder to pull off.

Long Moan’s weapon of choice is a spiked club, which is not as refined as Heninger’s mace, but still a perfect weapon for a generic goon. Death Adder probably budgets a fixed amount for each of his minions, so Heninger spent the extra coin for his weapon, while Long Moan spent it at the Ye Olde Clothing and Helmet Shoppe. It’s cast in a very light tan, practically matching his boots, and it has some nasty black spikes jutting out around the top.

And here’s a tunic comparison shot between Long Moan and Gilius. It’s the same style and texture, but still a new sculpt.

It sure took a while to get these common enemies into the line, especially with how many skeletons Storm has been pumping out. I guess, they figured there would be more of a cross-sell market on the skeletons. Either way, I’m glad to finally see these fellas turn up and only buying one set really put my willpower to the test. But, I have no doubt we’ll see recolors of this set, to match the recolored sprites that turn up in different levels, and I will most definitely pick up at least one variant. Indeed, I’m surprised the recolors haven’t turned up for preorder yet. Either way, these guys turned out great, and it’s awesome to finally have them represented on my ever expanding Golden Axe shelf! And I’m just about caught up on this line, although I’ll probably roll out some of the new stand alone dragons in the near future, as I picked up two of the four that Storm released.