I saw many of these models in the big shopping centre in Manchester at the weekend, there's some nice stuff.
The plastic army of the dead are very nice, a good match for the metal ones (I thought they were until the shop-guy said they were plastic) - very similar poses to the metal but a little more dynamic and of course I'm guessing they'll be less expensive than the metal.
The Ent is actually pretty nice in the flesh, I'm guessing it has posable joints and then you just need a little green to cover over the joints imho - I hope they do more than one tho as they do look like clones all in a row.
The 'new' Gandalf is not as good as mine, but that's only to be expected
but what can I tell you, I've applied for a job at GW 3 times and not even had an interview.
I can't claim to have had the idea first though, I copied mine from the Sideshow Weta model.
I had the new rules explained to me as best they could in just a few minutes, but I don't think I'll be buying into it. The rule book looked too daunting, its a fair bit thicker than the OR book, and I'm not keen on racking the models up on rectangular trays like warhammer and fighting in blocks. You might as well play with rectangles of MDF and write 'orcs' on the top. One of the things I like most about the original Lord of the Rings rules is individual movement of the models and the chaotic battle lines this produces. Any wargame that keeps battle lines in neat rectangles is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.
It seems that a lot of dice will be needed too - you're going to need a small cup to toss them all. I think in conversation with the GW staff you could need to throw as many as 36 dice in one attack - which is just ridiculous. Surely there are more efficient ways of arriving at a similar outcome using less dice, a table, or percentage dice etc - rather than simply throwing larger and larger handfuls of d6's.
I think the new game is just a ploy to encourage games that need more models anyway, so perhaps I'm not being as open minded to it as I should be. But making them cheaper in plastic doesn't fix the problem of how to paint them all. It does look like they're going to re-produce the entire range in plastic though to reduce the costs etc - so I fear the end is nigh for the metal range. I could be wrong. and perhaps some heroes will remain in metal, but on the upside, the new plastics are looking very nicely done and that's a good thing both for the new game and the original.